


let us sport us while we may

by curtaincall



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-08
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-11 14:08:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 24,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curtaincall/pseuds/curtaincall
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>High school AU. Mr. Holt's AP English class is full of bright but strange teenagers, and two in particular who won't stop bickering: irresponsible class clown Jake Peralta and overachiever Amy Santiago. For some strange reason, they're friends...and maybe someday they'll be something more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. September/October

September:

“Hey, Santiago!”

Amy looks over, towards the shout, but she knows who it’s going to be before she sees, because it’s only Rosa Diaz who calls everyone by their last names, like they go to Hogwarts instead of Schur High.

“Hey, Rosa. I didn’t know you were in this class.”

“What, you think I don’t have the balls for AP English? Please.”

“Right. Are you excited? Because I’m super excited.”

“Dork,” Rosa says, not unkindly. “Who’s teaching it? Holt, right?”

Amy nods. “He’s supposed to be fantastic, you know.”

“Tough grader?”

“I hope so.”

“Weirdo.”

“Hey, I’m not the one who tried out for football. Guys’ football.”

“The shoulder pads are badass,” Rosa shrugs. “I’m still pissed they wouldn’t let me on the team. That’s gotta be some kind of discrimination thing, right?”

“Maybe.”

The other students are filing into the classroom now: big, burly Terry Jeffords, whom Amy knows is secretly a huge softie, and Gina Linetti, whose hair is pink today, in blatant violation of school dress code, and those two dumb jocks who aren’t even good at being jocks, Hitchcock and Scully.

“Hello, Amy,” says Jake Peralta, sliding into the seat next to her. Charles Boyle, behind him as usual, takes the seat next to him and commences gazing at Rosa across the room. Jake rolls his eyes.

“Hi, Jake,” Amy says, smiling tightly at him. “Decided to challenge yourself for once?”

“Oh, what, ‘cause this is AP you think it’ll be a challenge? Dream on. You know I’m smart enough.”

He’s right--he is smart, smarter even than Amy, maybe, not that she’d ever admit it. But he seems allergic to effort of any kind, and that’s why Amy gets As and Jake gets Bs.

“Are you ready to take on Holt the Hardass?”

“You seriously call him that?”

“Everyone calls him that.”

“I am more than ready. I am going to wow him.”

“Did you get him a cute little present? An apple?”

“Apple-shaped pencil sharpener,” Amy mumbles.

“Oh, that is cute,” Jake says sarcastically. “You’re such a little suck-up.”

“I just want to make a good impression! All this ‘Holt the Hardass’ talk, you’d think you’d want the same thing.”

“What did you just call me?” He’s behind her, of course. Holt, “the Hardass,” toughest teacher there is, and he’s just heard her insult him. Great job, Amy.

“Mr. Holt! I, um, I was just quoting someone else…”

“I don’t need an explanation.”

Amy nods quickly, shoots Jake a dirty look (how dare he not warn her?), and fixes her attention on Holt, anxious to make a better second impression than she has a first.

“Welcome to AP English Literature,” he’s saying, staring at them over his glasses. “I trust you are aware that AP stands for Advanced Placement, and therefore this is one of the most rigorous classes offered in this institution. If you feel you cannot handle the upcoming workload, I advise you to drop this class. There are still, I believe, some seats open in the honors section.”

Amy sits up straighter. This is more like it; a challenge she can dig her teeth into. Holt can’t help but be impressed once he reads her writing, once he hears her analysis in class.

“I expect a classroom to operate efficiently. Dress code will be strictly--” (he glances meaningfully at Gina) “--enforced, and I will not tolerate talking out of turn, or frivolous behavior of any sort. Assignments will be on time, or they will receive a zero. I do not give extensions and I do not accept excuses. Understood?”

“Yes, sir!” Amy chirps, well ahead of the rest of the class. Jake rolls his eyes, and Rosa sighs, but she thinks she sees a hint of a smile on Holt’s face--though it’s hard to tell.

They’re dismissed with fifty pages of reading for the next day, and it turns out most of them have the same lunch, so Holt’s AP English class heads down to the cafeteria together.  
“Well,” says Jake loudly, “Holt’s nickname is not undeserved.”

“I like him,” Amy counters quickly. “You have to admire his strength of character.”

“He doesn’t take bullshit from anyone, I’m guessing,” Jake admits. “Which means you’ll be in a bit of a pickle, won’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“All that I’m-so-diligent crap. Holt won’t fall for that.”

“It’s not crap! I really do work hard.”

“You’re admitting to having no life?”

“I do so have a life! A life of rewarding work.”

“In what sense is slaving away at homework vaguely rewarding--never mind. Hey, question.”

“Yeah?”

“Want to go to winter formal with me?”

Amy’s taken aback. One of the less-pleasant side effects of having no life is never getting asked to things like winter formal. So she says the only thing she can think of.

“It’s September. Why are you asking now?”

“Gotta scoop you up before someone else does.”

She squints at him, not sure if he’s kidding or not. “Are you for real?”

“What, you think I’m that far out of your league?”

“You wish. No, I mean--wouldn’t you want to bring, like, a date?”

“Yeah. You.”

“Why?” She’s frankly baffled. Yeah, okay, she and Jake are sort of friends, and sure, he’s kind of cute, in a scruffy teenage-boy way, but this matter-of-fact romantic overture is out of left field.

“It’ll be fun. Come on.”

Amy’s still confused, but hey, what the heck, right? And she can’t really think of a polite way to say no, and it’s not like the guy’s asking her to marry him. “All right, sure.”

“Sweeeeet. I’ll get on hiring a limo.”

“Oh, wonderful.” She rolls her eyes and walks ahead of him into the cafeteria, hoping that maybe by December he’ll have forgotten about this whole thing.

 

October:

Unsurprisingly, Jake and Holt don’t exactly get along. Jake slouches in his seat and makes smart-ass comments, and half the time Amy’s not sure whether he’s even done the reading. But Holt hasn’t kicked him out of class yet, or even sent him to the principal’s office, and Amy has this weird feeling like maybe the Hardass likes Jake.

This pisses her off, because she wants to be Holt’s favorite. She’s been teacher’s pet since kindergarten, because how do you not like the girl who does all her homework and participates in class and never, ever breaks the rules? But even though she’s turned in two Santiago-style, single-spaced, double-sided papers, all she’s getting back are A-minuses and comments to “be more concise” and “stay within the length limits.” Not that constructive criticism isn’t great, because it is, but it would sure be nice to get a little adulation once in a while.

“Hey, how’d you do on that Great Gatsby essay?” Gina asks the lunch table. “Because I have to tell you, I did not understand that shit about the green light. Making us write about it is clearly discrimination against color-blind people.”

“B,” Rosa says tersely.

“I got a B, too!” Charles chimes in eagerly. “You know what they say about great minds…”

“That they get acceptable grades on papers? What, did you cheat off me or something, Boyle?”

“No! No, of course not, I mean, how would I even do that without Holt noticing…”

“I’m just messing with you.” Rosa stops him with a hint of a smile. “Calm down, little guy.”

“I got a B-plus,” says Jake, “which I figure is pretty good considering I only read the last two pages of the book.”

“Are you kidding me?” Amy asks, outraged. “You didn’t even read it? It’s not like it’s that long!”

“I didn’t need to. Essay was on the last two pages, I read the last two pages. Bam, done.”

“Well,” Amy says, smiling, “I read the entire thing, twice, and I did better than you, so maybe your method isn’t all that rewarding.”

“Yeah, but I don’t really care, though, is the thing.”

“You ought to! Junior year grades are the number-one thing colleges look at, you know. If you want a shot at getting into an Ivy--”

Jake rolls his eyes. “Amy, you’re the only one who gives a fuck about getting into an Ivy. I just have a more lassiez-faire attitude. Why stress myself out over something I can’t control? Right, Terry?”

Terry looks up from his yogurt. “I wasn’t listening. Sorry. What?”

“You agree with me that being stressed out is a waste of time?”

Terry nods. “Yeah. I used to be so hung up on stuff, like my performance on the field, my relationship with my girlfriend, everything. But then I had that breakdown--you all remember the Jeffords Debacle from last year--and now my therapist says that I’m doing way better at letting things go.”

“See. Maybe you need therapy, Amy.”

“Maybe you need to mind your own business!”

“Maybe you ought to take your own advice! Do whatever the fuck you want about college, I don’t care, just don’t pressure me to do the same, all right?”

“All right! Geez. But you know--” She stops herself, embarrassed.

“What?”

“You know I wouldn’t be saying this stuff if I didn’t think you had potential, right? I mean, God, Jake, you didn’t even read the damn book and you did almost as well as me. Think about what you could do if you put some effort in every once in a while!”

“My life, my choices,” Jake says, “but, for serious, I appreciate your concern. Truce?”

“Truce.”

*

On Halloween, Holt is absent for the first time. The AP English class is not assigned a substitute. Instead, Principal Goor wheels in the school’s derelict television, presses play on a DVD copy of the Great Gatsby movie from 1974, turns down the lights, and leaves with a warning not to make too much noise.

“Anyone want some herbed popcorn?” Charles asks, proffering a bowl to the room at large.

“You knew we were gonna be watching a movie today?”

“No, I just always keep a supply on hand. It’s a deliciously savory snack.”

“Okay,” says Jake, “who wants to run down to the library and get a real movie?”

“Slasher flick,” Rosa answers, and is out the door before anyone can object.

“Should we be doing this?” Amy asks, and kind of hates herself for always being the person who asks that question.

“Relax,” Jake says, rolling his eyes. “We are told to watch a movie. We watch a movie. Fact that it’s a different movie? Not all that important.”

Amy sighs. “Look, you may not take anything seriously, but--”

“I resent that! I take a lot of things very seriously indeed.”

“Oh yeah? Name some.”

“To begin with, my Halloween costume. I have elected to go as Woody from Toy Story, and Charles has agreed to be my Buzz Lightyear. And therefore I have, for the past three months, been engaged in a harrowing Internet search for the best possible ten-gallon hat. Tell me that’s not serious?”

“You still go trick-or-treating?” Amy asks incredulously. “I stopped years ago.”

“Oh, Amy, you precious innocent. You may not have heard of that cultural touchstone known as the Halloween party, but for us youths it is a night of debauchery and costumed fun. A latter-day masked ball, if you will.”

“Do you want to come, Amy?” Charles offers. “A whole bunch of us are going to be there.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I’m not really a Halloween person.”

“Or a party person,” Jake mutters.

“Oh, shots fired!” Gina reaches over and grabs some of Charles’ popcorn. “This is gonna be good.”

“Anyway,” Charles says, “if you change your mind, the party’s at Hitchcock’s house. That means he has to clean it up.”

Amy nods, hoping it seems noncommittal, and is saved by Rosa’s re-entrance.

“All right. I got Scream, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th. What d’you guys think?”

*

That night, against her better judgement, Amy sneaks out of the house and over to Hitchcock’s. She has, of course, no intention of putting on a costume, but in order to have something to say, she throws on an Oxford shirt and hangs a cardboard comma around her neck: the Oxford Comma. Which most of her peers ought to find pretty damn frightening, if their essays are any indication.

No one even looks at her, though; the door’s opened by some guy she doesn’t recognize, and the house is so dark and packed that she can’t find anyone she knows in the swarming masses. The music’s blaring, some song she knows but doesn’t like, and it seems like everywhere she turns someone’s grinding against someone else, or taking another shot of whatever the hell’s in those bottles, or drunkenly making out in a corner.

Halloween is definitely scary, all right.

This was a bad idea. She stumbles back out the door, walks home with ringing ears and vicarious nausea.

It’s not, she insists to herself, that she doesn’t like to loosen up. It’s that standing in that crowd of indistinguishable bodies makes her feel hollow, fills her with a longing to connect.

She’s fucking terrible at being young and carefree.

 


	2. November

November:

 

“I have a very exciting surprise for you,” Holt says, and Amy’s once again frustrated by her inability to tell whether he’s being serious.

“Oh, great,” Jake mutters next to her. “Probably a super-duper fun pop quiz or something!”

“Mr. Peralta,” Holt says sternly, “if you wish to speak in my class, you will need to raise your hand. We have been over this. And you will not be having a pop quiz. I have arranged for our class to take a field trip Friday evening to a performance of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. It should be a delightful evening full of laughter and poetry. That is all.”

Amy gives an involuntary little hop in her seat, because this is pretty exciting news, honestly. Rosa shakes her head and rolls her eyes in response, but not disapprovingly, and she’s glad that no one else seems to have noticed. Because, honestly, it’s kind of embarrassing that she’s this excited about Shakespeare, right? And they probably think that she’s only pretending to get Holt to like her. Which, okay, she definitely does want him to like her, there’s no denying that, but she’s also legitimately excited, because Much Ado About Nothing is her favorite play, and Beatrice is her favorite heroine.

“I expect you,” Holt was saying, “to have finished the play by Friday. You are to divide up into pairs and prepare scenes to read for the class. My past experience has indicated that leaving you to choose your own partners and scenes will result in tedious squabbling, so your assignments will be posted on the class webpage tonight. You may email me with questions.”

Amy’s assigned partner, she discovers that night, is Jake. She decides to take this as an indication of Holt’s esteem for her, because clearly Jake needs someone to rein him in, and this means Holt trusts her with the task.

So she texts Jake that night, because they’re going to need to start on this immediately if they’re going to wow Holt.

 

AMY: When are you free tomorrow? We should start rehearsing.

JAKE: yeah is that really necessary though? i’m pretty sure i can read out loud without rehearsing

AMY: Come on! You know we need to practice intonation and emoting and all that stuff.

JAKE: i think the assignment was just to read the scene, chill

AMY: Have you never heard of going above and beyond?

JAKE: i think faint whispers may have reached my ears

AMY: Even if you don’t care about this, I do, and I can’t do well without your help.

JAKE: fine, i’m free third period.

AMY: YES! See you then!

 

The start of third period finds them in an unused classroom, holding printouts of the scene and looking at each other awkwardly.

“All right,” Amy says, “it’s your line first.”

Jake clears his throat. “Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?”

“Yea, and I will weep a while longer.”

“I will not desire that.”

“You have no reason, I do it freely.”

“Surely I do believe your fair cousin is wronged.” Jake stops and shakes his head. “I’m sorry. You know I didn’t read the play. What’s going on?”

“Well, Beatrice--that’s me--is sad because her cousin just got left at the altar by Claudio, who’s a friend of Benedick--that’s you.”

“Got it.”

“Ah,” Amy continues, “how much the man might deserve of me that would right her!”

“Is there any way to show such friendship?”

“A very even way, but no such friend.”

“May a man do it?”

“It is a man’s office, but not yours.”

“I do love nothing in the world so well as you, is not that strange?” Jake stops again. “Wait, what?”

“Oh yeah,” Amy says, “also Benedick and Beatrice are in love, but they haven’t admitted it yet.”

“It looks like they just did,” Jake says dryly.

“Well, yeah. That’s part of the point of this scene. Did you not even read the SparkNotes?”

“I did not. Why bother when I have you?”

“Thanks ever so much.”

“I do love nothing in the world so well as you...helping me with my homework.”

“And to think you didn’t want to rehearse.”

“No, this is great. Now I can say something totally insightful in class, and Holt will think I read the play.”

“Why don’t you just read it? It’s not even that long.”

“We’re going to see it in a few days, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, and?”

“Clearly I don’t wanna be spoiled.”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“Say your lines, Beatrice. I thought we were here to rehearse.”

Amy rolls her eyes, but picks the script back up again. He’s right, after all. They’re just working together on a project. It’s not like they ever hang out normally: if they weren’t in the same classes, she wonders, would they even be friends? Or, on the other hand, would they be better friends if she didn’t for some bizarre reason see him as her rival?

*

Holt insists they present the scenes in the order they take place in the play, which means Amy and Jake don’t have to go until near the end of the period. She wishes they were dead last, the better to make a strong positive final impression, but it can’t be helped, so she settles in to watch her less-prepared classmates make fools of themselves.

Hitchcock and Scully are up first, and Amy can’t believe Holt put them together; they’re both such train wrecks that she finds herself simultaneously amused at their incompetence, irritated at the butchery of the text, and pleased that she has no competition on that front, at least. They stumble their way through a scene between Claudio and Don Pedro (Scully over-pronounces all the Italian names, and Hitchcock says “hear-tick” instead of “heretic,” and Amy’s dying with secondhand shame), and sit down to unenthusiastic applause from the class and a look from Holt that’s probably disapproval.

Terry and Rosa are better, but for some reason Rosa’s reading the man’s part and Terry the woman’s. Weirdly, it kinda works. Terry’s not particularly subtle, but he’s more than enthusiastic enough to make up for it, practically shouting his lines, and Rosa’s more into it than Amy would have expected, snarling at him, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, stamping her laced combat boots with surprisingly well-timed emphasis. “You are more intemperate in your blood than Venus, or those pampered animals that rage in savage sensuality!”

There isn’t even any snickering at the word “sensuality,” a show of unusual restraint from this class. Even Holt’s eyebrows are raised. “Ms. Diaz,” he says, when they’re done, “have you ever considered auditioning for one of the school plays? That was quite impressive.”

“Thanks,” Rosa says tersely, and sits back down again with an expression somewhere between embarrassment and pride. She returns Terry’s high-five, though, and smiles back when Amy gives her a thumbs-up from across the room.

Because, yeah, Amy can so be happy for her friend’s success, no matter how much she desperately wants Holt to be complimenting her. But Rosa and Terry are going to be a hard act to follow, and Jake and Amy are up next.

“Don’t worry,” he says in her ear on their way to the front of the classroom. “We got this.”

And the beginning of the scene goes fairly well, if predictably. Jake manages to say all the lines as though he understands them (for which Amy takes full credit), and there aren’t any awkward gaps or pauses in the dialogue.

“I protest,” Jake says, with a strange blend of gallantry and humility, “I love thee.”

“Why, then, God forgive me!”

“What offence, sweet Beatrice?”  
“You have stayed me in a happy hour. I was about to protest that I loved you.”

“And do it with all thy heart.”

“I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.”

“And, scene!” says Jake, bowing extravagantly before the class.

“That was...satisfactory,” says Holt. “You two have excellent chemistry.”

Which is a weird thing to hear from their English teacher.

*

Holt insists that they look “presentable” for the play that night, which means ties for the guys and skirts or dresses for the girls. Amy changes in an empty classroom after school, from jeans and a T-shirt into a dark blue A-line dress. She doesn’t love the dress: she’s more of a bright colors girl, truth be told, but every time she takes something pretty and daring out of her closet she ends up putting it back in again, too afraid (which is ridiculous) to wear it outside the house. So she’s in sensible navy, and when she meets up with the rest of the class to go to the theater, no one comments on her outfit at all.

It’s strange, seeing everyone dressed up; Charles and Terry fumbling with their ties, Gina in a ridiculous patterned skirt that somehow totally works, and Rosa, totally unexpectedly, looking absolutely fabulous in curve-hugging black. Charles’ eyes nearly pop out of his head when he sees her, and Amy can’t fault him, because she herself is having trouble looking away.

“Damn, girl, you look terrific!” says Gina approvingly. “Who’re you dressing up for?”

“Myself,” Rosa snaps back, but she’s got a little smile underneath, and she adds, “Thanks, though, glad you like it,” in a barely audible mutter.

“What’s up, my Shakes-peeps?” Jake strolls over, and Amy groans, because he’s taken the command to wear a tie and run with it, sporting a bright green monstrosity with red dots.  
“I wish I were color-blind,” she says, shielding her eyes. “Seriously, why would you wear that?”

“Um, why would I not? It’s awesome. Plus, I didn’t own a tie, and this bad boy was ninety-five cents. It’s a homage, if you will, to Macklemore, the Bard of our time.”

“Why didn’t you just borrow a tie from your dad or something?” Hitchcock asks, not that his tie is anything great.

“Because,” Jake retorts, “I don’t happen to have a dad anymore, thanks so much for reminding me.”

Amy sucks in a breath. This is not good.

“Hey,” she says to Jake, casually, “have you ever read any other Shakespeare plays?”

He gives her a weird look, and she herself isn’t even really sure where she’s going with this. “I haven’t even read this one.”

“So that’s a no?”  
“It is indeed.”

“Okay, well, did you see The Lion King?”  
“Um, do you mean, did I have a childhood? I still remember all the words to ‘I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.’ That movie was my jam.”

“Did you know that it’s based on Hamlet?”

“Oh. Huh. Cool.”

“Yeah,” says Charles, and it seems he’s picked up on Operation-Get-Jake’s-Mind-Off-His-Dad, because he chimes in with, “And what about Ten Things I Hate About You? Definitely a teen rom-com for the ages. And based on Taming of the Shrew.”

“Ugh,” says Rosa, “I hate that movie. She’s an awesome badass until some guy comes along and fucks it up, and we’re supposed to think that’s romantic? No thank you.”

“Not ‘some guy,’” Gina says with horror. “Heath Ledger. Makes all the difference.”

“Nope.”

Amy grins, because that’s a social situation navigated with poise and grace, an awkward moment defused (and God knows she can’t stand awkward moments).

Holt shows up, in the same suit he wore to teach class that day, and begins herding them down the street towards the subway. Amy’s in the middle of the pack when she hears Jake’s voice next to her.

“I noticed what you did there, you know.”

“What?”

“Changing the topic. From my dad.”

“Yeah, no problem.”  
“I just wanted to say thanks.”

Amy squirmed. “You’re welcome.”

“And thanks for making me practice that stupid scene. I know I, uh, I didn’t give you the easiest time about it. But, you know, it’s people like you that get shit done, ambitious people, and it’s kinda cool when slackers like me get to go along for the ride.” Amy nods, not sure what to say back, because this is an awful lot of emotion from Jake. He shoves his hands into his pockets and looks at the ground, and they walk on for a moment in silence.

“Oh, and, uh,” he says, glancing back up at her, “you look really pretty tonight.”

Before she has time to say “thanks,” or “what the hell,” or “keep it in your pants, Peralta,” he’s fallen back into the crowd, and she’s walking alone again.


	3. December, Part I

Thanksgiving break is over, and Jake hasn’t mentioned his invitation to winter formal since the day he asked her. Which leaves Amy worried, because she doesn’t want to stand him up, if he was actually asking her, because they’re friends, after all, and that’s not the sort of thing you do to a friend. But if he was joking, she sure as hell doesn’t want to show up to the dance and look like an idiot when he doesn’t pay any attention to her.

She knows that the reasonable thing to do is just go ahead and ask him: a simple, “Hey, we still on for winter formal?” would do the trick. But she feels incapable of being casual about this, so she resorts to the age-old strategy of the intermediary.

“Hey, Gina,” she says, one day before class, figuring that Gina a) is up on all gossip ever and b) has known Jake since they were in the womb, practically, so she’s most likely to know what’s going on--”Hey, Gina, were you planning on going to winter formal?”

Gina looks up from her phone with raised eyebrows. “Oh, I don’t know, why don’t you ask THE SIXTEEN SUPER-HOT GUYS who are currently vying for my hand?”

“So, yes?”

“Aaah-bsolutely.”

“Oh, cool.”

“Why are you asking?”

Amy’s stymied. The subject’s out there, but how exactly is she supposed to bring it around to Jake?

“Oh, I, uh, I was wondering if you had a dress yet? Because if not, we should totally go shopping together. Or whatever. I’m cool with whatever. I’m cool.”

“Oh, yeah,” Gina says, “you’re going with Jake on that weird-ass half-date thing.”

“I am? I mean, yeah, I am.”

Gina doesn’t seem to catch the stumble, though, because she just says, “Kay, let’s go this weekend,” and goes back to playing Kwazy Kupcakes.

So, okay. She’s apparently still going with Jake. Which is good, right?

Rosa leans over and taps her on the shoulder. “Santiago, you’re going to winter formal?”

“Yeah. You?”

“I dunno,” she says flatly. “Boyle asked me.”

“Of course he did.”

“And I told him I’d think about it.”

“Wait, what? I thought you weren’t into him.”

“I’m not. But, I don’t know, you’re going with Jake, and you’re not into him, right? So…”

“But Jake and I are just friends. Charles definitely wants more than that.”

Rosa shrugs. “He knows it’s not gonna happen.”

Amy’s opening her mouth to disagree when Jake and Charles walk in, and she quickly changes the subject.

“Well, do you want to go dress shopping with me and Gina this weekend, then?”

“Sure, why not?” Rosa does her little half-smile thing, and Amy grins back widely.

“Dress shopping, huh?” Jake asks, sliding into his seat next to her and slouching down. “What’s the occasion, ladies?”

“Winter formal,” Gina tells him.

“Oh!” He looks over at Amy. “I have high expectations, then. For reference purposes: I like red, purple, and blue, and I’m not so much a fan of the strapless.”

“Thank you so much for the information,” Amy says, rolling her eyes.

“What? Don’t you want your dress to match the corsage I’m going to bring you?”

“Oh, a corsage? Wow, you’re really going all out, aren’t you?”

“You betcha. I even looked into hiring a limo, but then I realized it would cost several hundred dollars and I have no money.”

Amy still can’t tell if he’s joking or not. Corsage, limo...this sounds like a real date. Is he into her like...like that?

Of course not, she tells herself sternly. They’re friends, and they’re going to winter formal as friends, and this is just Jake being silly. Jake being Jake.

She’s spared having to think of something clever to say in response by Holt entering the room.

“I hope each of you had a pleasant Thanksgiving,” he says, putting his books down on the table.

“How was your holiday, Mr. Holt?” Amy blurts out, then curses herself for sounding like a suck-up.

“It was extremely enjoyable, Ms. Santiago. I had a spirited discussion with several of my relatives regarding controversial political points of disagreement.”

“Very nice, sir,” Amy says, still not able to tell if he’s being sarcastic.

“Now, today we commence our unit on poetry,” Holt continues, “and I believe I asked all of you to bring in a winter-themed poem to read aloud to the class. Who would like to go first?”

“Oh, I would,” Jake says, and everyone swivels to look at him, because Jake volunteering in class is far from normal.

“Very well, Mr. Peralta, go right ahead.”

Jake clears his throat. “All is quiet on New Year’s Day. A world in white gets underway. I want to be with you, be with you, night and day. Nothing changes on New Year’s Day. I will be with you again. I will be with you again. Under a blood red sky, a crowd has gathered, black and white. Arms entwined, the chosen few. The newspaper says, says, say it’s true, it’s true, we can break through. Though torn in two we can be one. I, I will begin again. I, I will begin again. Oh, maybe the time is right. Oh, maybe tonight, I will be with you again, I will be with you again. And so we are told this is the golden age, and gold is the reason for the wars we wage. Though I want to be with you, be with you, night and day, nothing changes on New Year’s Day.”

He grins impishly and looks around, meeting Amy’s Death Glare with a wink.

“I don’t understand, Mr. Peralta,” Holt says calmly. “That does not sound like a particularly good poem.”

“That’s because it isn’t,” Amy pipes up.

“What do you mean, Ms. Santiago?”

“Those are song lyrics. God, Jake, do you not even understand what a poem is?”

“Ah, yes,” says Holt, “now I recognize the words to the U2 classic ‘New Year’s Day.’ I don’t appreciate your attempt to undermine this assignment.”

“Right. Sorry. Just thought I’d lighten the mood a bit,” says a chastened Jake.

“You were unsuccessful,” replies Holt, and the class moves on.

*

On Saturday, Amy meets Gina and Rosa at the mall.

“Okay,” she says, “so I figure we should be able to do this in just a few hours. I ranked all the stores by likelihood of containing something good, and then plotted out exactly how much time we ought to spend in each, with breaks built in for trying stuff on and a trip to the food court.”  
“Gimme that,” says Rosa, and snatches Amy’s schedule out of her hand. “No. This is bullshit.” She crumples the paper up and tosses it into a nearby trash can. “It’s a goddamn shopping trip. This level of planning is not necessary.”

Gina snaps her gum. “I’m gonna have to go with Scary Lady on this one. Amy, no offense, you’re adorable, but this whole thing?” She gestures at Amy’s outfit. “Not exactly winter-formal-level sexy here, girl.”

“What do you mean?” Amy asks indignantly. “I look fine!”  
“Fine as in how’d-you-do-on-that-test fine, sweetheart. Not _fine_ fine. We’re gonna get you to _fine_ fine. You too, boss bitch,” she adds, glancing over at Rosa. “I saw you in that slinky black number when we went to that play. You looked _hot_. Use that.”

Rosa does not look pleased, but she doesn’t say anything.

“All right, well, where do _you_ suggest we start?” Amy snaps.

“We’re going in here,” Gina says, and shepherds them into Macy’s. “All right. Thirty minutes on the clock. Grab whatever looks good to you and meet me at the fitting rooms then, got it?”

“Got it,” Amy and Rosa chorus.

Half an hour later, Amy approaches the fitting room, dresses slung over her arm, where Rosa’s waiting.

“You only picked out one thing,” Amy says, confused.

“Yeah,” says Rosa. “I’m gonna look great in it.”

She holds it up for Amy to see, and she can’t help agreeing; it’s black, of course, and tight, like the one she wore to the play, but longer, and fancier.

“Nice,” she says, nodding. “Where’s Gina?”

“In there, trying stuff on. She asked me for her opinion and I told her no.”

“No to the dress?”

“No to giving her my opinion.”

Gina marches out of her stall, in an iridescent sequined number that Amy kinda hates, but of course Gina’s pulling it off. “You look great,” she says truthfully.

“Of course I do. Now, what did you manage to dig up?”  
Amy hesitantly holds up her favorite of the dresses she’s found: something she’d never be brave enough to wear, but isn’t that the whole point of formal dances?

“I like it,” Gina says approvingly. “Very bold. Very un-Amy. Go try it on!”

So Amy, alone in her stall, slips the dress over her head and looks at herself in the mirror for a moment. She looks--good, actually, better than she’d have thought. The dress is red (totally not because Jake said that was one of the colors he liked), made of some kind of satiny material with beading or something (all right, Amy doesn’t know that much about dresses), fancy but not overstated. She actually likes it kind of a lot.

When she steps out, it seems like Gina and Rosa agree.

“Oh, girl, we are going to Hermione-Granger-in-Goblet-of-Fire the _shit_ out of you,” says Gina, and reaches over to pull Amy’s hair out of its usual ponytail.

“Nice,” says Rosa simply, and nods.

So, okay, she has a dress for winter formal.

*

She talks things over with Jake about a week before, and they agree that he’ll pick her up outside her house and drive her over to the dance, and then she’ll catch a ride home with Rosa. Separately. From Jake. She is not going anywhere with Jake post-winter-formal. She finds it pretty much impossible to overstate that point, because they are not dating and this is not a real date and she doesn’t want anyone to forget it.

A few days before the dance, he texts her:

JAKE: so I got a suit

JAKE: for winter formal I mean

JAKE: and don’t worry

JAKE: also a normal non-ugly tie

AMY: Good to hear.

JAKE: what color is your dress again??? for corsage purposes

AMY: Red.

JAKE: ooooh nice. i like red

AMY: Do you? I didn’t remember.

JAKE: liar

JAKE: is it weird that i’m excited for this??

AMY: Super weird.

It belatedly occurs to her, when he doesn’t reply, that the sarcasm may not necessarily have come through in text-message format.

*

Jake’s picking her up at seven, but she’s ready two hours early. Her mom helps her dress her hair (in a non-pulled-back way, thank you very much, Gina) and do her makeup (light but flattering), and she has a little clutch purse that seems actually kind of impractical and a pair of high-heeled shoes that she’s not entirely sure she can walk steadily on, let alone dance, and even though she’s still kind of nervous about the dress, it does look good when she checks it in the mirror for the forty-eighth time.

She sits on the inside stairwell of her building, near the door, waiting to buzz him in, a book in her lap and her phone by her side. (She’s supposed to call her parents to let them know she’s arrived safely.)

Her father’s just given her the no-alcohol-young-lady lecture when the doorbell rings, and she kisses him lightly, careful not to smudge her makeup, and heads downstairs quickly but not too quickly to answer the door.

It’s not Jake, though, but a liveried man, and beyond him is a limousine.

She’s frankly shocked. Even if Jake hadn’t said he was broke, limos are just not Schur High’s style. They’re kind of--traditional. And romantic. Definitely romantic. A limo is _not_ something you get for an evening with someone you’re just going with as a friend.

Her heart starts fluttering, which she’s fully aware is irrational. She starts coming up with things to say to him: “Wow, Peralta, whose dick did you suck to get this thing?” (Not appropriate.) “This is really nice, Jake.” (Too bland.) “I can’t believe you did this.” (Too sincere.)

The driver holds the door open, and she steps in.

And Jake isn’t there.

Instead, on the seat next to her there’s a corsage, perfectly coordinated to her red dress, and a piece of paper, folded in half, with “Amy” written on the back in Jake’s untidy scrawl.

She opens it to read.

“Hey. Sorry I bailed. I figured you should still go and have a good time, though. Enjoy the limo. --J.”

That’s all. No explanation. Nothing.

Jake Peralta stood her up.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "New Year's Day" belongs, of course, to U2.


	4. December, Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been so long since I've updated! I'll try to do better from here on out. :)

Amy has no idea what to do. Acting on autopilot, she straps herself in, because safety first, and stares blankly at the floor, at her high heels, at her shaved and lotioned legs. She opens Jake’s note again, reads it through again. It’s no more illuminating the second time.

She’s a little bit sad, and a lot embarrassed, but mostly she’s pissed: pissed at Jake, for being a dickweed and standing her up, pissed at herself, for thinking that it was possible that he could have been taking this seriously, when she knew perfectly well that he never took anything seriously, pissed at Schur High for having a winter formal, pissed at Jake, because why not mention him twice?

And so now she has to show up alone, which should only be incredibly humiliating.

She spends the limo ride scrunching her face up to prevent herself from crying and smudging her makeup--because if she’s going to walk into this dance dateless, she’s gonna look fantastic while she does it.

Amy’s neighbor Kylie, who goes to a different school, says that all their dances are in the gym because the administration’s too cheap to have them anywhere else. But Schur High’s gym is way too small to hold the entire junior and senior classes, plus external dates, and anyway their tuition is high enough (though Amy’s on scholarship) that the school certainly ought to be able to rent out the ballroom of the Hilton, or whatever.

So the limo takes her across town, and lets her out by the front doors of the hotel, and she takes a deep breath and steels her nerves and walks in.

It’s dark (which makes her wonder what the whole point of dressing up was, anyway), and the DJ’s playing Daft Punk, and while her eyes adjust she scans the room for someone she recognizes.

Terry’s there, but he’s with his girlfriend on the dance floor, grinning like a maniac, and she knows even if she waved to him there’s no way he’d see her.

She spots Gina grinding on some guy, looking like she probably had a beer or two at Hitchcock’s “pre-party” party, the way her face is flushed and sweaty. She still looks great, though, for which Amy gives her full points.

“Santiago?”

She spins around to see Rosa and Charles standing behind her, scowling and grinning respectively.

“Where’s Jake?” Charles asks, straightening his tie. “I want to show him my three-piece suit. We’re gonna take formalwear selfies together.”

“Yeah,” adds Rosa. “I wanna see how dumb Peralta looks in a cummerbund.”

Amy swallows. She knew this was coming--why didn’t she spend the drive preparing a light and witty response, instead of feeling sorry for herself?

“He couldn’t make it,” she says instead.

“Is he sick?” Charles asks, alarmed. “Did he get food poisoning? I warned him about that hot dog stand, I really did…”

“I don’t know,” Amy admits.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” asks Rosa, while Charles pulls out his phone, presumably to text Jake. “You were his date. He had to tell you something.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t,” says Amy tersely, and Rosa, apparently recognizing that she wants to be left alone, lapses back into her trademark reticence.

“AMY!” Gina comes barrelling across the ballroom floor to them. “Girl, you look fantastic. I am so proud of myself right now. You were a little fashion-challenged caterpillar, in your hair-pulled-back cocoon, and now look, you’re a beautiful sexually charged butterfly!”

“Thanks,” Amy says uncomfortably.

“Where’s Jake? Did you send him to go get you a drink? Because if so, fair warning, the punch is non-alcoholic and also disgusting.”

“Jake’s not here,” says Rosa, and Amy shoots her a look of gratitude (though she’s not sure how well it reads in the dim lighting), because if she has to explain that Jake stood her up one more time, she thinks she might throw up.

“Huh,” says Gina, and raises her eyebrows in that I’m-smarter-than-I-seem way that she has, but leaves it at that. “Well, come dance with me then, butterfly girl! Fair warning, though, I may get handsy.”

“I think I’ll pass, thanks,” says Amy, managing to scrounge up a weak smile. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

She doesn’t, not really, but she’s only been there five minutes and already she’s dying to leave.

It’s all Jake’s fault, she thinks, squirting the lotion that this hotel keeps next to its sinks onto her hands. If he hadn’t asked her to this dance in the first place, she wouldn’t be here right now in uncomfortable shoes and an uncharacteristically daring dress, feeling awkward and out of place.

What she doesn’t quite admit to herself is the possibility that if he had shown up, she might actually have had fun.

On her way back into the ballroom, she bumps into someone.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she exclaims, looking up--and it’s Mr. Holt. “What are you doing here?” she blurts out tactlessly.

“I was asked to chaperone,” he says, and, as usual, she can’t tell from her tone whether he relishes or resents the situation.

“Are you having a good time?” she asks instead. “I mean, I can’t imagine watching a bunch of hormonal teenagers gyrating on a dance floor is particularly amusing.”

Holt’s expression changes unreadably. “Isn’t that why you’re here, Miss Santiago?”

“Well…” she stutters, “I mean, it’s a bit different. I’m one of those hormonal teenagers.”

“Ah, yes. I imagine you have an escort with whom you are...ahem...gyrating?”

Amy can feel herself blushing. Discussing her romantic situation (not that her situation with Jake is anything remotely romantic!) with her English teacher is somehow both bizarre and typical.

“He, ah, didn’t show up.”

“Really? Was this Mr. Peralta, by chance?”  
“It was,” Amy says, surprised. Holt doesn’t seem like the type to notice or care about who’s dating whom.

“Such deplorable etiquette seems markedly characteristic of that young man,” Holt explains in response to her quizzical expression. “I hope, however, that you will not let that constrain you from enjoying the event. Surely there are others who would be more than willing to socialize with you.”

Amy glows at the compliment--clearly Holt thinks well of her!--and resolves to follow her mentor’s advice. Why let Jake ruin her evening? She looks great (Gina said so), almost all her friends are here...there’s no reason not to have a good time.

She thanks Holt, and joins Rosa next to the refreshment table, where she’s shotgunning snickerdoodles with aplomb.

“Oh, good, you came back,” is all she says. Amy nods, and takes a snickerdoodle herself.

“Excuse me?”

It’s an unfamiliar male voice, and an unfamiliar face--but she takes another glance, and, on second thought, maybe she has seen him somewhere before.

“Are you talking to me?” she asks, and cringes at how harsh it sounds.

“Yeah,” the guy says. “Amy Santiago, right? You’re in my calc class.”

“Oh yeah!” That’s where she knows him from, of course. He sits two rows in front of her and doodles SpongeBob in the margins of his notes. “You’re...Teddy?”

“Yeah!” he says enthusiastically. “Listen, I was wondering, do you wanna dance with me? They’re playing a pretty good song.”

“So they are,” says Amy redundantly.

He smiles, and she notices that he has dimples. “You seemed like you had cool taste in music.”

“Well, uh, sure, let’s dance!” she says quickly, realizing he’s waiting for an answer. “Fair warning, though--I’m terrible.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re fine,” he says.

Jake would have told you how horrible you were, a treacherous part of her brain says, but she quiets it, and, taking Teddy’s hand (which is a little sweaty, if she’s being completely honest), moves onto the dance floor.

The song’s beat’s in that awkward place between slow-dance and fist-pumping, and she’s not sure exactly what to do, but she decides just to follow Teddy’s lead; he’s kind of just swaying his torso side to side, in time with the music, and she does the same thing, staying a safe distance away, just in case he, in Gina’s words, “gets handsy.”

It’s actually kind of fun, and Rosa sends her a “yeah girl” smile from across the room.

The song ends, and switches to a slow one, and just as she moves to go back to Rosa, Teddy moves to put his hands around her waist, like they’re going to keep dancing. Instinctively, she recoils.

“Oh--” he says, pulling his hands back. “Sorry. Did you want, uh, to stop dancing?”

She’s way too flustered to consider getting that close to a guy she barely knows.

“No,” she says, then realizes how he phrased the question. “I mean, yes. I want to stop. Not that it’s not fun! I just, you know, need a break.”

“Yeah, no problem,” Teddy says, raising his hand in a sort of goodbye pseudo-wave. “See you in calc, I guess.”

“See you in calc.”

After that, the rest of the night isn’t so bad. She sits in a corner with Rosa and makes fun of all the ugliest dresses, and dances in a circle with Gina and Charles and some other people during the upbeat songs, and eats a bunch more snickerdoodles.

“How was your night?” her mom asks, after Rosa drops her off at home.

“Good,” she answers, and it’s only kind of a lie.

*

On Monday, she breezes right past Jake on her way into AP English, fixing her gaze resolutely ahead of her and away from him.

“Hey, Amy,” he says, sitting down in his customary place next to her, and she changes desks so they’re no longer near enough to talk without attracting Holt’s attention.

Jake apparently doesn’t care about attracting Holt’s attention, though, because he just says “Hey, Amy,” in a louder voice.

“I’m not speaking to you,” she says primly, still looking straight ahead.

“You just did!” he replies immediately, and even though she can’t see his face she just knows he’s got that wiseass grin on.

“That doesn’t count.”

“Oh, see, now you’re obviously talking to me,” he says, but she doesn’t answer, because why dig herself deeper into this logical hole?

“Come on, Amy,” he says after a moment of silence. “You can’t be that mad. I sent you a freakin’ limo! That cost all of the money I was saving for Jay-Z tickets. Do you know what that means to me?”

“You were saving that money for Taylor Swift tickets,” she retorts without thinking.

“Aw, see, I knew you couldn’t go without talking to me.”

“Aberration,” she says coldly.

“We’re basically having a conversation! I know you’re mad. I know what I did was a little bit of a dick move, okay?”

“A little?” she says, unable to contain herself. “Jake, I got dressed up and waited for you. I shaved my legs! In December! Do you know how frequently I shave my legs in December? Not frequently! I spent an unholy amount of money on a dress I’ll probably never wear again! And it’s not like I was all that sold on the idea of going to this thing with you in the first place! If you didn’t want to come, why didn’t you just not ask me? Or at least cancel, by, I don’t know, calling or something, in the morning, not at seven the night of the dance, via limo-post!”

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “Honestly. I didn’t know you’d be this mad, I swear.”

“I thought we were friends,” Amy says, turning to look at him at last. “And friends don’t stand friends up with zero explanation!”

“I have an explanation, if you’d give me a chance to say it!”

“All right. Go ahead. Explain.”

But instead of bursting out right away with some glib story, he falls silent.

“Well?” she asks, after a moment.

“Never mind,” he mutters, and turns away from her to look at the front of the classroom. “Just--forget it.”

“I’m not going to forget it,” Amy hisses, but she has to do it under her breath because Holt’s started talking. “I’m mad at you. And you can forget about borrowing my history notes anytime soon!”

But now Jake’s the one not talking.


	5. Winter Break (December, Part 3)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is half the length of a normal chapter! It's all one long scene, and I think I prefer it on its own.

Officially, Schur High lets out for winter break at twelve noon the Friday before Christmas.

But instead of heading to their various subway stations and bus stops, most of the students traipse (in a long, snaky line of friend-clusters) to the outdoor skating rink that’s only a few blocks away from their school, and spend a few hours falling all over the ice.

Amy loves it, because she’s actually a really good skater, having taken lessons for most of elementary school, and she relishes every chance she can get to show off. But other people (like, say, Jake Peralta) are unapologetically awful, and apparently enjoy landing on their asses time and time again while trying to skate backwards or with their eyes closed.

“Why’d you get guy skates?” Gina asks Rosa, swapping out the boring white laces on her own skates for a neon green pair she brought from home.

“They’re not guy skates,” Rosa explains, “they’re just hockey skates. Way more badass.”

“Whatever,” says Gina.

“Hey, you guys, come on!” Terry speeds across the ice towards them, executing a sequence of complicated footwork.

“Whoa,” someone nearby says. “I did not expect that from Jeffords!”

“Hey, just ‘cause I play football doesn’t mean I don’t have depths! Ice dancing is a highlight of the Winter Olympics.”

“Damn straight!” Charles chimes in, still desperately grabbing to the wall. “Of course, just because I appreciate the sport doesn’t mean I’m any good at it…”

“Here, I’ll help you,” Amy says, stepping onto the ice and taking Charles’ hands in hers. “I’ll skate backwards while you go forwards; it’ll help stabilize you.”

“Thanks,” Charles says cheerfully, and they start moving slowly across the ice.

After a couple minutes of awkward silence, Charles opts for even awkwarder conversation. “So what’s going on with you and Jake?”

“Jake who?” Amy asks, even though she knows very well what he’s talking about.

“Peralta. You guys were supposed to go to winter formal together, and he bailed on you, and now you’re mad at him and not speaking to him.”

“Yeah, that about sums it up.”

“Well, you should know he’s really sorry and he wants to be friends again.”

“Did he tell you to say that?”

“No!” protests Charles unconvincingly. “He just...he screwed up, okay? And English is way less fun when you guys aren’t bickering.”

“We do not bicker,” says Amy with dignity, and, releasing Charles’ hands, skates away.

To her great surprise, she spots Holt on the ice, a few feet away from her, gliding majestically, his dark head in contrast to the unruly mops of hair on the teenagers around him.

“Mr. Holt!” she says breathlessly. “What are you doing here?”

“Chaperoning, Miss Santiago,” he replies inscrutably. “Ensuring that you youths don’t kill yourselves.”

“We appreciate it!” Amy cooes, hating herself.

“Thank you. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must perform that duty. It seems Mr. Peralta is attempting to throw Mr. Boyle in the air. This seems destined for disaster.” He swooshes away.

Amy glances after him, and sees that, indeed, Jake and Charles are trying out some kind of pairs-skating lift thing.

“Ooh, do you think they’ll get seriously injured?” asks Rosa eagerly, speeding up so she’s skating parallel to Amy.

“I hope not.”

“I hope so.”

Across the rink, Holt’s talking to Charles and Jake, but, weirdly, instead of chewing them out like Amy expects, he just nods and skates away, letting them continue whatever dangerous thing they’re doing.

“What’s going on?” Amy turns to Rosa, but she’s gone--in fact, as she looks around, Amy realizes that there’s no one left on her half of the rink. No one left on the ice at all, in fact, except for her, and Jake, and Charles, who leaves his weird ice-dancing position and shuffles over to the side of the rink, where there’s...a boom box?

And music starts playing, and Amy’s very confused, and all the way over on the other side of the rink, Jake’s skating in circles, nodding to the beat as George Michael’s voice starts to sing: “I feel so unsure as I take your hand and lead you to the dance floor…”

He makes his way across the ice, doing this weird half-shake half-dance thing with his upper body, and she’s a bit amused and a bit worried he’s going to fall down.

He reaches her midway through the first chorus, and before the second verse starts he slides to his knees in front of her. His face takes on a mock-serious cast, and he makes a fist and pulls his hand down dramatically past his face, and, looking up at her, sings along to the music:

“Time can never mend  
The careless whispers of a good friend  
To the heart and mind  
Ignorance is kind  
There’s no comfort in the truth; pain is all you find

I’m never gonna dance again  
Guilty feet have got no rhythm  
Though it’s easy to pretend  
I know you’re not a fool

Shoulda known better than to cheat a friend  
Waste the chance that I’d been given  
So I’m never gonna dance again  
The way I danced with you…”

“Amy,” he says, as the trumpet solo takes over, “I’m sorry I stood you up, okay? And I wanted to show you, in front of everyone, that I care about you, and about being your friend, and I totally understand if you’re still mad at me and still don’t want to talk to me, but I thought I’d ask one more time...can you forgive me?”

“Stand up, you idiot,” she says, rolling her eyes at his antics, and helps him to his feet.

He offers a hand to her. “Would you care to dance, my lady?”

“I should be honored, good sir,” she says, smiling despite herself, and takes his hand, and they swing across the ice, Amy going backwards and Jake going forwards, swaying slightly to the song, spinning around and around, until the music fades out and everyone else gets back on the ice, and they all skate until the light starts to fade, and that’s when winter break begins at Schur High.

 

 


	6. January

Amy’s been back at school barely two minutes and is still rearranging her locker when Jake comes sliding up to her, clearly just having rushed in from outside, the snow still melting off his brown curls.

“You’re early,” she says, surprised, and then realizes that’s not a very friendly greeting.

Jake doesn’t seem to care. Instead, he nods enthusiastically and leans up against the locker next to hers. “Yeah. New semester, you know? Getting off on the right foot.”

She laughs, and he looks confused.

“What’s so funny?”

“I assumed you were joking. You know it’s not a new semester, right?”

“But we just got back from winter break! I thought the new semester started along with, you know, the new year!”

“We haven’t even had exams yet,” she points out. “Second semester starts after midyear exams and Project Week.”

“Whatever,” says Jake, grinning at her. “New year, new me, then. Resolution: Peralta gets places on time!”

“How’s that going for you?”

“As you can see, astonishingly well! For I am here, am I not? Here and crystal-clear.”

“Not a saying.”

“It is now!”

“Anyway,” says Amy, rolling her eyes and carefully closing her locker, “we have--” she glances at her watch--”forty minutes before first period. What do you propose to do with yourself until then, O Punctual One?”

“Well, see, O Even Punctualler One, you’re always here insanely early, so I figured you were the perfect person to help me figure out how to while away the weary hours.”

“Okay, you know as well as I do it’s O More Punctual One, not Punctualler.”

“I do know that, and I did intend to make you correct me, cause your face gets all scrunchy when I screw up grammar and it’s kinda adorable.”

“What?” she screeches. Adorable? What does he think he’s doing?

“What?” he parries back, eyes wide and worried.  
“Did you just--”

“Nope!”

“Okay, then,” says Amy, moving on, but filing away the “adorable” comment in the back of her mind for later consideration. “Ordinarily, I do homework. But, as it happens, I did enough work over break that I don’t have any left for now. I can only assume you are not in the same predicament.”

Jake rolls his eyes. “You’re not wrong. “

“What do you have to do?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On what our homework was.”

“You didn’t do any work over break?”

“It’s called break for a reason,” Jake explains. “Cause you’re supposed to take a break from work.”

“So you don’t have anything done?”

“I do not.”

“What am I gonna do with you?” she sighs, and it’s a rhetorical question but he answers anyway.

“Teach me your ways, sensei. The ways of the anal-retentive and un-fun.”

“If you’re going to insult me, I’m certainly not going to help you.”

“Fine. The ways of the appropriately organized and moderately pleasant.”

“Not exactly sweet talk, but I’ll take it. Now. Come with me. We can’t rearrange your life in the hallway.”

She heads for the library, which she knows from experience is empty this early in the morning, and Jake trots after her. She can hear his footsteps, but she doesn’t look back--she can feel his eyes on her, and she’s frightened to meet them.

Why does he do things like this? Call her “adorable” in a matter-of-fact tone and pretend like he hasn’t said anything out of the ordinary, show up ridiculously early to hang out with her, give her that charming grin even while he’s insulting her? Ask her to winter formal and then utterly neglect to show up...and then make it up to her with the most embarrassingly goofy thing she could possibly have imagined?

Why does she kinda like it?

They reach the library before her thoughts have calmed, so she plops down at one of the work tables and opens her planner ferociously, hearing Jake sit down next to her but not looking up at him.

“Okay,” she says, turning to the page for this week, “get out a piece of paper. We’re gonna plan your schedule.”

“Paper?”

She turns to meet his eyes, hoping he’s joking, but they’re arrestingly sincere, and she realizes that Jake Peralta probably hasn’t bought school supplies since September.

He confirms this belief by shrugging, and she sighs, ripping out a sheet from one of her notebooks and placing it in front of him.

“Please tell me you at least have a pen.”

“Pencil okay?”

“It’ll do.”

He pulls off his backpack and places it on the table in front of them, unzipping it to reveal possibly the most trash Amy’s ever seen smushed into that little of a space.

“I know I got one in here somewhere,” he explains, fishing through candy wrappers and at least one old sock in search of something to write with.

“Stop, stop, stop,” Amy orders. “I can’t stand looking at this garbage. Just borrow my pen. We’ll work on personal cleanliness later.”

He looks affronted. “I am an extremely clean individual. Smell me.”

Without thinking about it, she leans over and sniffs his neck. And yeah, okay, he does smell pretty good.

“I didn’t mean hygiene,” she clarifies, lifting her eyes to his, their faces still unusually close. “Just neatness.”

He gives a crow of laughter, and she jerks backward at the sound. “You think I smell good!”

“I did not say that!”

“You implied it!” He stands up from his chair and addresses the rest of the (mercifully empty) library. “World at large: let it be known that Amy Santiago thinks I smell good!”

“Will you sit down?” she snaps, and grabs his arm, shoving him back into his seat.

“All right, I’m only teasing,” he says, looking hurt, and she regrets her short temper.

“Don’t worry about it.” She cocks her head, looking at him, and on an impulse entirely spurred by the puppy-dog look in his eyes, adds, “And, don’t you dare quote me on this, but you do smell good.”

“Really?” Now he looks like a mischievous puppy, not a beseeching one.

“Yeah, really, don’t make me say it again.”

“Thank you, Old Spice,” says Jake reverently, and before she can direct this conversation away from the alarming turn it’s taken, he sniffs her in return.

“What are you doing?”

“Returning the compliment. You don’t smell so bad yourself.”

“All right,” she says, smiling despite herself. “Enough of this. What classes do you have today?”

They plan out Jake’s entire week over the next hour, but when Amy goes to bed that night, the only thing she remembers from that morning is the proximity of Jake’s body to hers, and the feel of his breath on her neck, and the strange sensations it produced in parts of her body she definitely doesn’t want to think about in connection with Jake Peralta.

*

Midyears at Schur High are three hours long, which always sinks in about a week before they’re scheduled to begin. And this particular day, before Holt shows up to first-period English, is no exception.

“Literally everyone else’s exams are an hour long,” Jake grouses. “Okay, maybe an hour and a half. Still.”

“I like it,” says Amy, shrugging. “It’s good preparation for college.”

“Is everything you do in life in preparation for college?” Jake snaps back.  
“No,” replies Amy, offended, and sticks her nose in the air and looks away.

“Aw, hey, I’m sorry,” says Jake, and pokes her with his pencil. “I know some of the stuff you do is in preparation for grad school.”

“I’m not mad,” says Amy haughtily, but she’s glad when Holt walks in and she has an excuse not to talk to Jake anymore.

He keeps poking her with his pencil, though, and when she looks over at him he’s making an exaggeratedly mournful face, and so she pokes him right back with her own pencil.

Having duly revenged herself, Amy fully intends to begin paying attention to Holt, since he’s starting to talk about their upcoming midyear, and she opens up her notebook to begin taking notes...but just as she starts to write “Class Notes” at the top of the page, Jake steals her pencil.

“Give that back!” she hisses under her breath.

He shakes his head and grins.

So she reaches over towards him, but he snatches his hand away off his desk and down into his lap.

For a moment, Amy’s stymied. She wants that pencil back, all right (and she wants to get it back from Jake, specifically, because letting him have it would be letting him win, and letting him win is an intolerable concept for her), but she doesn’t want to put her hand in Jake’s lap.

Or, rather, she kinda does want to put her hand in Jake’s lap, and that scares her enough to shy away from it.

She’s on the verge of biting the bullet and going for it--and hoping that the only thing she gets hold of is her pencil--when Jake abruptly pulls his hand out from his lap, still holding the pencil, and in one fluid motion reaches back and tucks it behind his ear.

Well, that’s easier to deal with, certainly.

Amy carefully--because she definitely, definitely does not want Holt seeing this--reaches her hand around the back of Jake’s chair, like she’s yawning and just needs to stretch out, and rests her hand lightly near his head. He turns away from her and towards her hand and puckers his lips, lightly blowing on her fingers to let her know he’s sensed she’s there.

She lets her hand rest in place for a few more moments, until Holt looks away, then seizes the opportunity to make a grab for the pencil.

Success! Her hand grazes the back of his ear, but she has her pencil in hand.

Unfortunately, as she’s moving her hand back over to her desk to, at last, begin taking notes, Jake reaches over and grabs her hand in his, claiming both it and the pencil for his own.

“Your move, Amy,” he mouths, and she scowls.

She pauses a moment to think, but is inconveniently distracted by the feel of Jake’s hand on hers, and her thoughts wander to that instead of to a game plan for Operation Pencil Recovery.

Why is this affecting her so much? She’s held hands with boys before--hell, she’s held hands with Jake himself before, less than a month ago, during Skate into Vacation. Maybe it was the fact that they were wearing gloves then, and they’re not now, or maybe it’s just that touching someone else during class feels pleasantly and thrillingly illicit, but she’s way, way more aware of all the places their hands are touching than she’d like.

Though, she has to admit, it’s not unpleasant. Jake’s hand is warm, but not sticky--though she reflects, worriedly, that the warmth of his hand must mean that her hands feel cold to him. And then she realizes how ridiculous it is that she’s worrying about whether or not Jake Peralta thinks her hands are clammy, and goes back to enjoying the sensation of her hand curled up inside of his.

She struggles a bit, tries to free herself from his grasp--and bring her pencil back once and for all--but he just closes his grip tighter, and she can’t force his fingers apart.

She tries relenting, letting her hand go limp, in an attempt to fake him out, but he doesn’t relax his hold on her, and she acknowledges with dismay that she’s predictable.

So she gives up, and listens to Holt, and doesn’t take a single note the entire class, because she’s too busy holding hands with Jake Peralta. And it feels nice--both the struggle and the surrender, she notes, have roused something in her, a tiger she didn’t know was sleeping.

At the end of class, he lets go of her hand, and she’s surprised at how disappointed she is.

So all right, she says to herself, Jake can affect her body. But she’s adamant that he has not made inroads--yet--upon the far more important territory of her heart.

  



	7. Project Week

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been so long! I'm so sorry! This summer has been incredibly busy for me (in a great way) and I haven't had many chances to write. Thank you to those who have stuck with this story...I love you all!

Midyear exams always go well for Amy; she responds well to pressure, she figures, and she’s a quick and voluble writer (helpful for the AP US History exam, which has three analytical essay questions, all of which need to be completed in three hours, and Holt’s midyear, which is one huge long essay on the ending of Hamlet). So even though she won’t see her scores until school resumes after Project Week, Amy’s pretty confident that she’s managed to maintain her valedictorian-caliber GPA.

Project Week has never been as easy for her as midyears. Exams are simple: straightforward questions and answers, a prescribed period of time, everything laid out for her, with clear expectations and quantitative assessments. Projects are...not as simple. Every year, every student at Schur High chooses something to occupy them for the week; Jake and Rosa are both observing detectives at the local police precinct, Charles is getting in on the ground floor of the restaurant business, Terry is doing independent watercolor painting, and Gina’s working on a dance routine with a troupe of people she picked up somewhere.

Amy always has a hard time settling on a project--freshman year, she spent the week fetching coffee down at the superintendent’s office in her school district. She got to dress up like a professional every day, but it was ultimately just boring gofer work. Sophomore year, she “broadened her horizons” by going on the school trip to Spain--kinda pointless, as she’s fluent in Spanish (though the Cuban dialect she grew up with is significantly different from Castilian).

So this year, junior year, she took the bull by the horns and scored a volunteer internship at a local NPR affiliate.

Which, she’s starting to realize two days in, consists mostly of sealing envelopes containing thank-you-notes to contributors. And is incredibly boring.

There’s no rule that says she can’t use her phone during work, though.

 

AMY: Envelope 745. Nearing Shining-level insanity.

ROSA: cool, let me know if you snap, i wanna see the murderous rampage

AMY: How’s the detective lifestyle?

ROSA: ugh. got paired with some lame old fart who does desk work all day. super jealous of jake.

AMY: Why, what’s Jake doing?

ROSA: working with a hot young lady cop who’s investigating a murder. he’s out at a crime scene right now. basically teenage boy heaven

AMY: Huh. Lucky him. Well, I hope your situation improves.

ROSA: same. ugh, gotta go. old fart’s anti-technology. if he catches me texting you i’m toast. he’s surprisingly scary for an old fat dude.

AMY: Okay, talk later!

 

So after that, she kind of has to text Jake, right?

 

AMY: I hear you’re at a crime scene?

JAKE: just got back actually!!!!! SO AWESOME

AMY: Sounds cool! Did you catch the murderer yet?

JAKE: nooooooo but detective vi says she thinks it’s looking promising

AMY: Is Detective Vi your mentor? I hear she’s hot?

JAKE: eh if you’re into blondes

JAKE: i bet you’d like detective vi actually

JAKE: not in a gay way

JAKE: just cause she’s a smart lady getting stuff done, and you’re into that

JAKE: she’s always talking about how they need more women on the force

JAKE: and you like that feminist stuff, idk

AMY: I mean, yeah, she sounds pretty great.

JAKE: you shoulda done your project here

JAKE: instead of NPdoRk

JAKE: then we could be hanging out

AMY: Ugh, you would think this NPR job would be more interesting...but no.

JAKE: lotsa envelopes?

AMY: SO MANY ENVELOPES

AMY: Entering envelope-induced coma…

JAKE: hahaha

AMY: Let me know if you catch the guy!

JAKE: or girl

JAKE: gotta be open-minded when it comes to murderers

AMY: Haha, exactly. Good luck!

 

Jake and Detective Vi catch the murderer, of course. Jake gives a presentation about it the day they get back to school, complete with PowerPoint slides including photos of the victim’s remains, the perp’s face when they arrested him, and (of course) a selfie of Jake holding up his honorary-detective badge, looking proud.

Amy was not asked to do a presentation. She tries not to be jealous, sitting there in the cafe-gymna-torium, tries to be proud of her friend, tries to remember it’s not a competition, not her fault she happened to pick a less exciting project, one that wouldn’t read as well in slideshow format.

It doesn’t really help, and when Jake returns to his seat after finishing, she doesn’t bother to turn around and high-five him. (Charles is congratulating him enough for everyone, she reasons. It’s not like Jake’s ego needs to get any bigger.)

But, thankfully, after assembly they have English class, and they’ll finally be getting their midyear papers back. And that’s an area in which she’s pretty sure she can beat Jake.

“Welcome back,” begins Holt, without cracking a smile to show whether he actually means it. “I trust you all had an enjoyable week away. I spent mine grading your essays, a much less exciting task than playing Encyclopedia Brown.” He looks pointedly at an apparently oblivious Jake. “In any event,” Holt continues, “for some of you, these grades will be a harsh jolt back to reality. Ms. Linetti? Would you care to help me distribute the exams?”

Gina rolls her eyes and goes over to take the sheaf of papers from Holt. Amy’s stabbed with jealousy again, though she knows this time it’s even more senseless--Holt probably didn’t pick Gina because he likes her the best, or neglect to pick Amy out of any malice. But she can’t help imagining with what eagerness she herself would have jumped up to help hand back the papers, unlike Gina’s uncaring stroll to the front of the room.

Jake gets his paper back before she does, and he lets out a whoop of triumph upon seeing his grade--though Amy can’t make it out even from her seat next to him, she knows Jake well enough to be aware that he doesn’t whoop for anything less than a B-plus.

And she’s perfectly willing to allow him a B-plus, as long as she gets an A.

But when Gina presents her with her paper, looking at the grade before Amy herself can see it, she shakes her head in mock sorrow and whispers, “Rough luck, girl.”

It’s a B-minus. Eighty freaking percent! She flips through the pages, looking for Holt’s comments, trying to figure out what she’s done wrong, but can’t find any major flaws--he’s marked her word choice “awk” in a few places, sure, but that’s it--until she gets to the end of the paper.

“You make a strong and (as usual) well-written argument,” Holt has written at the bottom, “but the very strength of your position is here a weakness. You focus on cherry-picking evidence to fit into your points, to the detriment of understanding and interpreting the text as it is. Your writing is admirably neat, but I’d like to see you get messy. You’re excluding elements you don’t want to see, instead of re-interpreting your argument to fit the evidence.”

Her argument is too strong? That’s the problem? She lets out a frustrated groan.

“Hey, Amy!” Jake pokes her with his pencil. “Amy, Amy, I got an A-minus! Whaaaaaat!” He lifts his arms and pumps them in a raise-the-roof gesture. “I bet you got an A, huh, smarty-pants?”

“No,” says Amy shortly, and lifts her paper to show him her grade.

Jake’s eyes go wide. “Aw, man, Amy, I’m sorry! That’s gotta be rough for your valedictorian aspirations, huh?”  
“Yes.”

“Well, hey, if you ever need help, Holt wrote here that my understanding of Ophelia’s despair over Hamlet is ‘remarkably incisive,’ so I’m sure I could give you a few pointers…” He’s grinning widely, laughing at her crossed arms, but suddenly his voice drops an octave, gets deeper, mellower, and she’s jerked back to dancing with him on the ice last month. “You wanna go for coffee or something after school and talk about it?”

“I’m busy,” Amy snaps back at him, and turns away so she won’t have to see the hurt look in his eyes.

*

In the middle of US History, Rosa gets called to Principal Goor’s office, which in itself is nothing unusual--she’s forever being sent there for losing her temper with guys who try to catcall her and punching them in the face, or destroying school property because she’s frustrated with the speed of the internet in the computer lab--but what is strange is that they’re barely three hours into the new semester, and Amy’s pretty sure even Rosa can’t have screwed up already.

Rosa doesn’t come back by the end of the class, though, and Amy’s starting to get worried when Rosa plops down next to her at lunch, looking unfazed as usual.

Less usual is the pretty blonde girl who takes a seat next to Rosa and smiles nervously at Amy.

“This is Bernice,” Rosa says, with no other explanation.

“I’m a transfer student,” Bernice explains. “Rosa’s my guide for today.”

“Really?” Terry asks incredulously. “They made Rosa Diaz the guide for the new girl? Sweetie, I am so sorry. We are not all as scary as she is, I promise.”

“Oh, Rosa’s been very nice and not at all scary,” Bernice assures him.

“That’s what I keep trying to tell people! I’m Charles, by the way. Charles Boyle. I see you’ve chosen the chili today--allow me to recommend that you add a shake or two of cumin? I find the cafeteria’s spice allotment lacks flavor.” He proffers a container of cumin to Bernice, who waves it away politely.

“So, Bernice,” Jake says, “did you just move to New York?”

“No, I’ve lived here my whole life. Things just weren’t working out at my old school, and I wanted to get out as soon as possible.”

“Things weren’t working out? What, did you flunk your classes? I wouldn’t think Schur High would take a failure on, especially at such short notice,” says Jake.

“No, I was actually top of my class,” Bernice says, and Amy stiffens automatically out of competitive spirit. “It was more...social disconnect.”

“What, were people making fun of you? I can’t imagine anyone not liking you,” says Jake, and Amy turns to look at him, surprised by his flirtatious tone, and realizes that he’s looking at Bernice with unhidden admiration.

“I’d rather not talk about it,” says Bernice, sounding uncomfortable, and Jake backs off, which is for some reason extremely satisfying to Amy.

Probably, she figures, she’s glad to see him get shot down after he’s beaten her on the English exam.

That’s all it is. She’s definitely not jealous of the way that Jake’s looking at Bernice. She certainly doesn’t feel as though he ought to be reserving that look for her, Amy. She’s absolutely not mad that he asked her to get coffee with him not two hours ago, and seems not remotely fazed by her rejection. She’s glad that he didn’t mean it seriously. She’s just annoyed with him for getting a better grade. That’s absolutely all.

And the weird feeling in her stomach, like she’s going to throw up, is just because the school chili sucks, not because she feels like she threw away something she didn’t know she needed.


	8. February

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> B99 is back tomorrow, you guys! (Or tonight, depending on when you're reading this.)  
> For now, there's this...

February:

  

The week before Valentine’s Day, Amy learns two things about Holt she didn’t know before.

a) He’s gay;

b) He’s a romantic.

Neither of which she would ever have guessed, despite having known him for almost six months. Though, with Holt, “known” is a misleading word. “Been acquainted with” is perhaps more accurate, if more verbose.

But she--and the entire AP English class--is made aware of Holt’s sexual preference and tender sympathies when he announces that they’ll be reading love poems in February, “some of my and my husband’s favorites,” in recognition of the upcoming holiday.

“Is your husband a teacher, too?” Amy blurts, trying to show how open-minded she is by not being taken aback by the gay thing.

“He is a professor. Of classics, in fact, and so a number of these poems have been translated from their original Latin into English.”

“Ooh! Are we gonna read any dirty Catullus or Ovid?” Gina asks eagerly, and, in response to the class’s collective weird look, reminds them, “I take Latin.”

“Both poets are represented here,” Holt tells her, his impassive demeanor not betraying whether or not he’s impressed with her linguistic knowledge, “but I would not classify either selection as ‘dirty.’ There is more to love than sex, Ms. Linetti.”

Amy turns to Jake, expecting to see him stick a finger down his throat and mime vomiting at such a proclamation from Holt, but instead he’s nodding like he totally agrees, and turning towards Bernice (who sits behind him now) to say “Who knew Holt was such a softie?”

It’s not a particularly clever observation, but Amy can’t help wishing it was made to her.

When she thinks about it a little more, though, she realizes that Jake’s scarcely said two words to her in the last few weeks. He can’t still be mad at her for turning him down for coffee, can he? He was totally gloating, rubbing his superior performance on the exam in her face. He knew as well as anyone how competitive she was, how annoyed she’d be at that--how could he have expected her to be nice to him after that?

Even though Jake’s clearly in the wrong, though, Amy decides that it’s up to her to make an overture of friendship--let him know she misses hanging out--so she leans over and asks, “Hey, Peralta, want to be partners for this poem thing?”

He gives her this weird squinty look, and shakes his head, saying, “Sorry, but I’m working with Bernice. I don’t think Charles has a partner, though?”  
Which is how Amy ends up paired with Charles Boyle for the unit on love poetry.

_Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requirens._

_Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior._

_I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you wonder._

_I know not, but I feel it is done and I am tortured._

“That’s...depressing,” Charles says. “And short.”

“I know,” says Amy, dissatisfied. Everyone else has something at least sonnet-length, and they’re stuck with two measly lines.

“Does he hate and love the same person?”

“I think so,” Amy says thoughtfully. “Or he hates how he loves her. Or she makes him angry, and that’s what makes him love her. Or he goes back and forth between hating and loving.”

“ _Excrucior_. Great word. Sounds like a Harry Potter spell.”

“Yeah, tortured. Like crucified. Physical pain. And it’s something that’s being done to him, right? Something beyond his control. So are hate and love, I guess--beyond his control.”

“Aw, man, you totally get this,” says Charles.

Amy glances over at Jake and Bernice, and realizes that yeah, she kinda does.

She thinks about it again. Hate and love. She’s been wondering why, why, all year, basically--why Jake’s done the things he’s done, why he asked her to winter formal and why he stood her up, why he serenaded her out on the ice, why he told her she was pretty and held hands with her during English class and asked her out for coffee, why he’s ignoring her now.

And she’s wondered why she’s felt the way she’s felt, too, why the idea of going to the dance with him made her both excited and terrified, why she’s been so happy to see him after every break, why she was so sad when they weren’t talking and so relieved when she could forgive him, why holding hands with him made her feel, yeah, okay, turned on, why she’s so angry at seeing him with someone else.

It’s because she likes him-- _likes_ him likes him, in the most juvenile phrasing possible.

 _Odi et amo_. She hates the way that love is making her feel.

*

So she has romantic feelings for Jake Peralta. So he probably used to have romantic feelings for her, and doesn’t anymore, because she turned him down, and Jake’s a realist, not a romantic--he’s not going to pine away after some girl he thinks doesn’t like him back, because that would be lame, and, frankly, kinda creepy. He’s going to move on. He _has_ moved on, if his behavior with Bernice is any indication.

And all she can do is try to move on, too, because unfortunately her revelation was pretty terribly timed. It’s a crush. She’ll get over it.

Valentine’s Day, all the same, is not something she’s been looking forward to. Jake and Bernice aren’t officially dating yet--at least, their Facebooks both say single (not that she’s been checking obsessively, or anything), and Amy has a suspicion that he’s going to try something on Valentine’s, as desperately cliched as that might be.

Schur High does this thing--the Prom Committee of Schur High does this thing, to be exact--where they sell carnations for a dollar each, proceeds to go towards making prom free for everyone, on Valentine’s Day, and you can get them sent to the recipient of your choice, and someone will come in and deliver it along with a note during class, _Mean Girls_ candy-cane style.

“Or,” Gina says, “if you have the balls, you can give it to them yourself.”

As a member of prom committee, Gina’s running the carnation stand the period before they have English, and since Amy has it free, she’s hanging out behind the booth and helping Gina judge all the people buying flowers.

Lots of people have been buying them for their friends, actually, their platonic friends, which Amy feels isn’t the wisest gesture.

“I mean, a flower sends a very specific message,” she says to Gina. “A _romantic_ message. And if you send it to a friend, a just-a-friend friend, they could get the wrong idea, and that could just lead to awkwardness all over the place.”

“True,” says Gina. “Or you could, you know, just not worry about stuff like that and be glad someone bought you a flower.”

“Well,” says Amy, “no one has.”

“Santiago,” says Rosa, who’s apparently been standing near them this whole time without saying a word, “if I buy you a stupid fucking carnation do you promise not to read anything romantic into it?”

“I didn’t mean to fish,” Amy insists, feeling embarrassed at being caught whining, and at having her whining misinterpreted. “You don’t have to buy me anything.”

“Maybe I want to.” Rosa digs a crumpled one-dollar bill out of her pocket and slams it down on the table. “Linetti, give Santiago a carnation, please?”

Grinning, Gina hands it over, and Amy shrugs, thanks Rosa politely, and tucks the flower behind her ear.

“Amy and Rosa! Now there’s a pairing I never expected.” Jake’s standing at the other end of the room, leaning against the door, and even though he looks exactly the same as always, in his hoodie and plaid shirt and blue jeans, and there’s no grace in his posture, he’s just a sloppy teenage boy, Amy’s heart still starts thumping faster in an extremely undignified way.

“What do you want, Peralta?” Rosa growls.

“Just to buy a carnation.”

“Who d’you want it sent to?” Gina asks, fishing the notepaper out from under the stack of flowers. “And what class do they have next period?”

“I don’t need to tell you that,” says Jake with a smirk, “because I’m giving it to her myself.”

“Hmmmmm…” Gina nods her approval. “I have taught you well, Jacob. Go! Go and be a man!” She thrust the carnation at him mock-dramatically, and he comes over to take it, and leans across the table, and Amy catches a whiff of piney deodorant mingled with sweat, and it shouldn’t make her feel anything but annoyingly, it does.

“What are you going to do if she says no?” she asks belligerently, not thinking the words through before she says them.

“Ladies never say no to Jake Peralta.”

Amy lets out a forced guffaw. “I think we all have plenty of proof to counteract that statement.”

She looks over at Gina and Rosa, hoping for backup, but they both just look confused.

“Actually…” Gina says slowly. “Actually, has Jake even asked anyone out? Ever?”

“He asked Santiago to go to winter formal with him,” says Rosa, apparently forgetting the fact that Jake never materialized that night.

“That was just as friends,” Amy says quickly.

“You said yes, though,” Jake reminds her. “Which puts my success record at, you guessed it, 100 percent. Ladies never say no to Jake Peralta. Thanks for being a statistical help, Amy!”

“You’re so very welcome,” she says, through gritted teeth, as he waltzes off, carnation in hand.

Awesome. Now he’s more confident than ever, and he’ll ask Bernice out, and she’ll say yes, ‘cause who wouldn’t say yes to Jake? He’s great.

This unrequited thing sucks.

*

During English class, Jake presents Bernice with the carnation, which she accepts, and what’s more, she seals the deal by kissing his cheek. It’s not remotely dirty, but Amy sees red, and snaps out: “Mr. Holt! Could you please remind my fellow-students not to engage in public displays of affection during class time?”

Jake shoots her a confused look, like he doesn’t understand why she’s not happy for him (a real friend, she reminds herself, would have been happy for him, not pissed off), and Holt sighs and says, “Ms. Santiago, it _is_ Valentine’s Day. However, please do restrain yourselves for the remainder of the class period.”

Class rolls on--they’re still talking about love poetry, and Rosa’s reading aloud from William Butler Yeats’ “No Second Troy,” which, Amy’s considering, could well be about Rosa herself--when a prom committee member comes in to distribute that period’s carnations.

There’s one for Hitchcock, which is just depressing, and one for Rosa, unsigned, but probably from Charles (though he’s mostly over her by now), and one, surprisingly, for Amy.

She thinks there must be some mistake, and double-checks the name on it to make sure it’s not really for Amy Santorino, who’s a freshman with whom she gets confused frequently. But no, it says Santiago, clear as day, and it’s signed “Teddy.”

It takes her a minute to remember, but then she has it--Teddy from calc, Teddy whom she danced with at winter formal when Jake stood her up.

A few weeks ago, she’d have been neutral or even negative about this--would have thought it was kind of weird for someone she barely knows to send her a carnation, might even have been vaguely creeped out.

But Jake’s looking at the carnation from his desk, trying, she can tell, to figure out who it’s from, and she’s grateful to Teddy for making her look desirable, attractive, for showing Jake he’s not the only guy ever to have been interested in her.

It was very sweet of Teddy, she decides. She resolves to thank him during calc, albeit not with a kiss. And if he asks her out? Maybe she’ll say yes. Why the hell not?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Latin poem quoted is Catullus 85; the translation is my own.


	9. March

March:

 

Teddy does ask her out, as it happens, and so far they’ve been on two dates--the first dates, actually, that Amy’s ever been on, although a treacherous voice in her head reminds her that holding hands on the ice with Jake Peralta sure felt more romantic than anything she and Teddy have done so far.

He takes her for sushi during lunch for their first date (his choice), which is awkward, because Amy doesn’t actually like sushi, but she doesn’t want to say anything for fear of creating a still more awkward moment. So she eats basically nothing, only managing to stomach a bit of a California roll, and when it comes time to pay, she insists they split the bill evenly, because she has some feminist principles, dammit. (Besides, she’s pretty sure Teddy’s not a scholarship student, unlike her, which means he can more easily afford this overpriced Brooklyn restaurant, which makes her all the more determined to pay her share.)

“You ate so little,” he says, sounding guilty. “It’s not fair to split it evenly.”

He’s technically right, and it’s not like it goes against her principles or anything (it’s even kind of sweet), but it still gets her back up. (Jake, says that persistent voice, wouldn’t have tried to pay more than half. Jake wouldn’t have taken you for sushi in the first place. He’d have taken you for pizza, because he knows you like comfort food. Yeah, well, Jake’s not on the table, she snipes back at the voice, and tries to enjoy her time with Teddy.)

They hold hands on the walk home from the sushi place, and Amy’s pleased to note that Teddy’s a lot less sweaty than he was that time they danced at prom. She doesn’t think she could handle being this close to someone who smelled bad.

Although, they haven’t gotten particularly close yet, physically. The hand-holding is about as far as it’s gone, and while she appreciates the delicacy that’s led him not to kiss her on the first date, she still wonders when he’s going to get around to it.

She’ll be seventeen in a few months, after all, and if she doesn’t have her first kiss by then (her first real kiss, not counting the time with Kylie when they were seven, “just to practice,” which doesn’t count, not because Kylie’s a girl, but because they were seven and had no idea what they were doing), she thinks she might have to be locked up as some kind of freak.

Their second date is better than the first, thank God--they go for a walk in a park near school, the morning after a snowfall, during a period they both have free--and it’s before the smoke and exhaust from the cars has dirtied up the white powder, so it’s clear and beautiful, and theirs are the first footprints on the new ground.

Teddy, again, takes her hand, but makes no attempt to go farther, and she wonders if she’s going to have to be the one to initiate kissing. She’s not really sure what to do--do you keep your mouth open or closed on a first kiss? Tongue in or out? How long should it last?

To be fair, she doesn’t know whether Teddy has any more knowledge about this than she does, but she’s still reluctant to take the lead, as badly as she wants to get to the kissing part. (She doesn’t admit to herself that if they’re kissing, the silences might not be so awkward anymore.)

She does, however, admit to herself that she’s jealous of the pace that Jake is apparently proceeding at in his relationship with Bernice. Oh, they haven’t crossed the line into inappropriate PDA, and Principal Goor has seen no reason to regale the student body with another lecture on public and private pleasures, as he does whenever any couples start getting a little too affectionate in the hallways--they haven’t done any of that, but Amy can see by the way Jake’s hand rests on the small of Bernice’s back that they’re more comfortable with each other than she is with Teddy. Definitely, they’ve made out, she figures--and she finds herself wondering if they’ve maybe ever gone even farther.

Her speculations on her own sexual experience versus Jake’s are brought to the forefront of her mind when Gina announces in the girls’ restroom one day, “I lost my virginity this weekend.”

“You what?” Amy screeches, at first horrified that Gina’s chosen such a public place for this confession. “Aren’t you worried someone might overhear you?”

“Calm down, goody-two-shoes,” says Gina, in a tone so blasé that Amy suspects it’s affected. “I don’t care if anyone hears. This isn’t the Victorian era, you know. Women are allowed to have sex.”

“Did you use protection?” Amy hisses, still frightened of being caught talking about this.

“Obviously,” says Gina. “I mean, I’ve been on the pill forever ‘cause my menses are unfortunately irregular, and we used a condom. I’m not getting pregnant anytime soon.”

“Who did you...do it with?”

“A lady never tells.”

“Was it...did you…”

“Did I reach climax? Yes. Not bad for a first-timer, if I do say so myself. Nailed it in one.”

“Okay, gross.”

“I am sharing my life with you, and you’re calling it gross?” asks Gina, offended. “Next time I’ll tell Rosa first.”

“No, I really am glad you told me,” says Amy, chastened. “I don’t mean to be all judge-y. I just...well, I don’t have much experience in that area. As you know.”

“Even with the Tedster?”

“Don’t call him that.”

“What, the Teddy-bear not getting you where you need to go?”

“That nickname’s not better. And no. We haven’t even kissed yet.”

“Damn, girl! What are you waiting for?”

“He’s the one waiting!”

“Too shy to start anything, huh? Well, he should get on it. You guys have been dating...oh, about as long as Jake and Bernice, right? And they’ve absolutely gone to second base by now.”

“You think so?” Amy asks, desperately curious. “You think they’ve gone farther?”

“Why do you care?” counters Gina sharply.

“I don’t,” says Amy, hastily backing off. “I just, if you’re having sex, and Jake’s maybe having sex, and I haven’t even been kissed yet...I’m starting to feel left behind.”

“Aw, don’t get in the dumps, grumps! I’m sure it’ll happen before long.”

“Thanks,” says Amy, touched, and then--“So, can you give me, like, a hint, about who it was?”

“Hmm...he was gorgeous, obvs…” And Gina rattles on until next period.

*

So it’s with a mixture of trepidation and excitement that Amy accepts Teddy’s invitation to “come over to my house and hang out on Saturday?”

She figures this is probably It, that maybe he was uncomfortable with the idea of kissing her in public (which is a fear she can 100 percent get behind) and wanted to wait until they had some privacy, which is also nice and considerate and thoughtful of him. All in all, she’s on board with the plan (though if he tries anything other than kissing, which she’s pretty sure he won’t, she’s determined to explain that she really doesn’t feel comfortable going beyond that right now).

The disadvantage to this third date is that she has to meet Teddy’s parents, which is going to be nervewracking. The entire subway ride there, she listens to music on her iPod and tries to imagine all the things that could possibly go wrong--his parents could disapprove of her being Latina or on scholarship or Catholic--she doesn’t have a ton of experience with rich WASPs, she realizes.

But it’s only Teddy’s mother who’s there when she knocks on the door of their roomy brownstone (his dad is apparently away on business), and she offers Amy a homemade cookie and smiles warmly.

“Mom, this is my girlfriend Amy,” Teddy says, not seeming particularly interested in developing the interaction, “and I think we’re going to go upstairs and play games or something.”

So Amy only has time to shoot a brief “thank you” Mrs. Wells’ way before following Teddy up to his room.

She’s a bit struck by his easy use of “girlfriend” in describing her--she hasn’t thought of their relationship that way, and it’s odd to hear it from his mouth.

“So,” he says once they get to his room, which is basically the same as every other teenage-boy room Amy’s ever seen, and with seven brothers, she’s seen several--how was your morning?”

“It was good,” she says, sitting down next to him on the bed. “Did some homework. That calc problem set was murder, huh?”

“Yeah, I didn’t enjoy it.”

“Do you think you’re going to keep taking math in college, or have you decided to go more of a humanities route?” Even to herself, she sounds boring, like she’s a teacher interviewing him. This is not how you get boys to kiss you, Amy!

“I haven’t really thought about it,” he says, and then--“Hey, is it okay if I kiss you?”

Wow. Apparently asking incredibly boring questions is in fact how you get boys to kiss you.

“Um, sure,” she says, and adds, nervously, as he’s leaning in, “but, uh, I haven’t really kissed anyone before. Like, ever. Just so you know. If I don’t do a good job.”

He smiles at her, and it’s a genuinely warm smile (the kind of smile Jake gives her, says the voice in her head she wishes would just shut up and let her have this moment), and says, “Don’t even worry about it.”

And then he kisses her (for the record: open mouths, slight tongues). She kisses him back to the best of her ability, which, as she’s by now admitted (which she’s starting to regret), is not great.

Neither, though, is he--or, she worries, maybe this is just what kissing is like all the time, and he’s great at it and she’s great at it, and it’ll never get any better than this, this wet slobbery mess.

She doesn’t know when to end the kiss, either, so she’s relieved when he finally breaks away.

“Thoughts?” he asks her, like he’s looking for an evaluation.

“Um. Interesting!” she says, not wanting to lie.

“Want to try again?”

“Okay.”

They kiss a few more times, and it does actually get better, she’s happy to notice--though she’s still not really enjoying it. Afterwards, they just sit and talk about school and how Teddy’s doing on this video game he’s been playing and Amy’s plans for taking the SAT in a few weeks, and before long it’s time for her to go.

Teddy kisses her one more time before they leave his room, and it’s deeper, if that’s the word she wants, than any of the others--he really gets his tongue in there, which, honestly, she could kinda do without, and it lasts for a while, and it’s really not doing anything for her but he seems to enjoy it.

For the whole train ride home, she thinks about kissing. She wonders if it’s clear to everyone she’s riding with that she’s just been making out--she wonders if when she comes home her mother’s going to be able to tell at once. She feels dirty, which is ridiculous, because she did absolutely nothing the Pope himself wouldn’t be okay with.

And as she reflects, one thing stands out, incredibly clear: she has to break up with Teddy.


	10. April, Part One

Every year in the spring, Schur High goes on a school-wide camping trip upstate. It’s possibly Amy’s favorite weekend of the year, and she’s excited to be sharing a cabin with Rosa and Gina, and to be helping Charles and Terry with the meal they’re sharing chef duties for (they showed her the menu, and it looks fantastic), and maybe to be spending some quality mentor time with Holt, who’s chaperoning (his husband’s coming, too, and she’s going to see if she can finagle her way into a casual friendship with him so that he’ll be so favorably impressed he’ll ask Holt who the brilliant student with the shiny ponytail is)....she’s looking forward to just about everything except spending time with her boyfriend.

Because she still hasn’t broken up with Teddy, despite the resolutions she made the first day they kissed. She’d gone into school on Monday with every intention of calling things off with him, but when push came to shove she hadn’t been able to do it.

She’s endured--yes, that’s the right word for it, dramatic as it may sound--two more kissing sessions. And, to be fair, it has gotten better. Teddy’s initial sloppiness was due, it seems, to lack of practice, and she does find it sweet that he knows almost as little as she does about what they’re doing. But he still sticks his tongue practically down her throat, far too violently for her taste, and she can’t figure out how to tell him she doesn’t like it.

He’s given her the perfect opportunity--every time they’ve kissed, he’s asked her afterward for her thoughts, for what he could be doing better, but she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings so she tells him nothing, just says everything’s fine.

It’s definitely going to hurt his feelings when she breaks up with him, which is why she’s been putting it off. But the prospect of spending an entire weekend with Teddy wanting to sneak around behind the trees or into his cabin in order to spend more time together...that’s enough to make her disregard any consideration for his feelings and go for it.

She picks the worst possible time, of course. They’re lining up for the bus, in an assembly line loading duffel bags and backpacks into the storage compartments, and Teddy’s next to her, so she turns to him and says, “Hey, um, I wanted to say something.”

“What’s up?”

“I just--I think it might be a good idea if you and I took a break for a little while. Like, a break from our relationship.”

“Like, break up?”

“Yeah.”

He looks hurt, and she restrains an impulse to take it back.

“Well, if that’s what you want I...I guess it’s fine. But, uh, if you change your mind…”

“I’m not going to change my mind,” she says firmly, because if she doesn’t close the door completely she’s going to relent, she knows it.

“Okay,” he says, and then, “I’m going to go over there now,” and he walks off, leaving a gap in the assembly line that’s immediately filled by Gina.

“Did I just hear what I thought I heard?”

“Me breaking up with Teddy? Yeah.”

“Need a hug?”

“Aw. Yes, please.”

Amy reaches out her arms, but Gina turns away, saying, “Okay, I’ll get Charles.”

“I don’t want a hug from Ch--” Amy starts, but Gina’s already gone.

“Hey,” says Rosa, from the other side of her--has she been there all along, or does she just have the ability to sneak up on people silently? “I’m not gonna hug you, but if you, like, want to talk about your feelings, or whatever you might be having, you can sit next to me on the bus and I’ll not pay attention, but you can pretend I’m listening and I won’t get mad at you.”

“Thanks,” says Amy, touched.

So she sits next to Rosa on the bus, and Charles and Gina are behind them, and Terry and his girlfriend are in front, and they play BS and reminisce about the trip from last year, and vow that this time it’s gonna be even better. It’s collegial and friendly and fun, and Amy spares nary a glance for Teddy, who’s sitting with a few of his friends near the back of the bus (Amy has to sit near the front, because she gets motion sickness on long journeys), or for Jake, who’s with Bernice a few seats away, his arm around her, saying something to make her laugh.

Okay, she spares maybe a glance or two or five for Jake. So many glances, in fact, that Rosa notices, and gives her a funny look, and asks, “Is there some reason you keep turning around? Is something going on?”

“What? Oh, no,” Amy says. “Nope, just bein’ weird.”

“Okay,” says Rosa. “Because if you’re trying to look at Teddy, he looks miserable. If you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t,” says Amy, “but great, now I feel bad.”

“Don’t. Just because he’s upset you broke up doesn’t mean you have to be. You wouldn’t have done it if you were happy, so why feel bad now?”

“Because I don’t like hurting other people’s feelings?”

“Well, that’ll never make sense to me,” says Rosa, deadpan, and Amy cracks up, because of course Rosa’s kidding, of course she doesn’t like hurting people’s feelings, she’s known Rosa forever and though she may be gruff she’s not truly cruel...but the way Rosa says things like that Amy’s always left 99 percent sure that she’s kidding and 1 percent worried that she’s not.

So the rest of the bus ride passes in pleasantness, and when they get to the camp and unload everything, and Amy and Gina and Rosa bid goodbye to Charles and Terry and head off to their cabin to drop off their suitcases, it almost feels like everything’s going to be normal. They settle in pretty quickly, and there’s still a few hours before dinner with no scheduled activities, so Gina runs over to where some seniors she knows are staying and borrows a bunch of board and card games, and some people from the neighboring cabins come in and play with them, and it’s everything Amy loves most about this trip.

But there’s still that ache inside of her, the one that she’s felt since the first time Jake stopped flirting with her and started flirting with Bernice, and all the Cards Against Humanity games in the world aren’t going to make that feeling go away--even when she’s not thinking about it, it’s there.

She is happy, though, and she knows that if she just keeps on going, trying to focus on all the immensely positive stuff in her life and putting the thing she can’t control out of her mind, eventually this ache might lessen, might disappear completely. She’s sixteen years old, after all. She has an entire lifetime to find someone who loves her back.

Dinner, when it finally arrives, is spinach ravioli with a mixed greens salad, and chocolate cake for dessert. Jake and Bernice happen to sit at the same table as Amy does, and although she makes polite conversation with them, it’s hard to really enjoy her food.

She actually really likes talking to Bernice, which is good, she figures. Bernice is cool and smart and nice, and for some reason that makes it both easier and harder that Jake is with her--easier, because it’s nice knowing he’s happy, that he has good taste, and harder, because it makes it impossible to dislike Bernice, which is what her gut wants her to do.

But then Bernice shares a piece of chocolate cake with Jake, eating it off a fork that he’s holding, and Amy maybe throws up in her mouth a little bit. “I gotta go,” she says, leaving behind her plate in blatant violation of meal cleanup policy, and goes outside, all the way past the lake and into the woods near her cabin.

Rosa’s there, having run back to grab a coat, but she doesn’t, luckily, talk to Amy, just looks at her funny before heading out.

Amy grabs her own coat from the cabin and heads back into the woods, pacing back and forth, trying to get the image of that cake-laden fork out of her head. She’s angry, now, more than anything--angry that she can’t control her own feelings, angry that she can force herself to excel at anything except, apparently, being cool with Jake and Bernice.

She tries taking deep breaths to calm herself down, and it kind of works, and she’s been pacing more slowly for a few minutes when she hears footsteps behind her.

She turns around, and it’s Jake.

“Rosa told me you were here,” he says. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

She nods.

“I heard you broke up with Teddy,” he says, matter-of-factly.

She nods again, not trusting herself to speak without giving anything away.

“Okay,” he says, “good. Because there’s some stuff I need to tell you, but I wasn’t gonna do it when you were with Teddy, because I didn’t wanna screw that up by saying this stuff, so I couldn’t say it, and, now, well...now I can.” He looks at her for a moment. “Unless you don’t want me to. But I, uh, I think it’s better for both of us if you hear this.”

“Okay,” she squeaks out. “What is it?”

“I’m in love with you. I have been for a while--but I didn’t really get that I liked you, didn’t realize it, I mean, until the beginning of the year. So I asked you to go to winter formal with me because I didn’t want to make a big thing out of it, and i figured if you just wanted to be friends we could just go as friends, but I was planning on telling you how I felt that night. I guess I thought it would be dramatic, or whatever.

“But the night before, I was thinking about it--I was super-nervous, obviously...I was thinking about it, and I realized just how much I liked you. And I thought about how big a deal it was going to be for me to tell you, and how you might freak out or whatever, and I...well, I chickened out. As you know. I was scared, ‘cause, well, we’re so young, and winter formal is so tiny and stupid, and this thing--love, I guess--felt so big and important that I didn’t feel like I was ready for it yet.

“So I stood you up. And I’ve said I’m sorry before and I’ll say I’m sorry again, because that was a terrible thing for me to do, but I was freaked out by my own feelings and I couldn’t handle it.

“So then I decided, well, what if I don’t make a big deal out of it? What if I just, you know, try to sound Amy out and see if she likes me back, and hold off on the big revelations stuff until I’m sure she feels the same way? Cause, I don’t know, I thought maybe there was a chance you did. I mean, it seemed im-freakin’-possible that you could have held hands with me all during English class that one time and not have been feeling anything. But I wasn’t sure. So I asked you out for coffee that time, and I thought I was doing it so well, I thought I was being really casual, and you just shot me down and I figured, well, this is it, Amy doesn’t like me. And I figured I’d better try getting over you.

“It didn’t work. Knowing that you were with someone else, with that Teddy guy, it made me so jealous, and it made me think, what if she, I don’t know, stays with Teddy forever and grows up and marries him and I never get a chance to tell her how I feel? Because I sure wasn’t gonna say anything when you were with someone else. I wasn’t gonna get in the way of that.

“But you broke up with him, and I have a chance to tell you now, and I’m telling you I love you because there’s no time like the goddamn present, and if I don’t say it now I might never get another chance.”

He pauses before continuing. “And, uh, in conclusion, there was this poem that Holt had us read, and I memorized the end of it, ‘cause it kinda sums up what I’m trying to say better than I ever could--

_Now therefore, while the youthful hue_

_Sits on thy skin like morning dew,_

_And while thy willing soul transpires_

_At every pore with instant fires,_

_Now let us sport us while we may,_

_And now, like amorous birds of prey,_

_Rather at once our time devour_

_Than languish in his slow-chapped power._

_Let us roll all our strength and all_

_Our sweetness up into one ball,_

_And tear our pleasures with rough strife_

_Through the iron gates of life:_

_Thus, though we cannot make our sun_

_Stand still, yet we will make him run.”_

He stops for breath. “So like I said, why not now? Anyway, this has gone on way too long and you haven’t said anything so I’m just gonna say it one more time--Amy Santiago, I love you--and then I’m going to go.”

He turns away.

“Wait!” she says, quietly. “I don’t--I don’t know what to say. But please don’t go; I don’t want you to leave.”

Something lights up in his eyes. “Really?”

“Yeah,” she says, again softly--why is she being so quiet, they’re in the middle of the woods, the rational part of her brain points out.

“Cool,” he says, and slowly, giving her every opportunity to tell him to stop, or move away, or whatever, he moves his face closer and closer to hers, and she doesn’t move, just brings her own face up to meet his, and then, after a few seconds of just standing extremely near to each other, at last, with infinitesimal precision, he closes the gap between them and kisses her.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some may be wondering why I had Jake be less emotionally honest than he is in canon...short answer is, in this fic he's a sixteen-year-old boy, not a thirty-whatever-year-old man, and therefore less mature.  
> Also, italicized quote is from Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress," and is of course also the source for this story's title!


	11. April, Part Two

Kissing Jake is completely different from kissing Teddy, she realizes instantly. Jake’s mouth is gentler and sweeter and makes her heart beat with joy, not nervousness. Part of it is due to how she feels about him, she’s sure--but also, based on technique alone, Jake is a better kisser than Teddy. It feels like he knows what he’s doing.

That thought sets off a train of far less pleasant ones--namely, if Jake knows what he’s doing, where did he learn it? Probably his girlfriend. Who would no doubt be very upset to learn that he’s currently using the skills she helped hone on another girl.

Amy pulls away from the kiss. “Jake! Stop!”

He immediately does, taking a step back for good measure. (Her instinct is to start towards him again, to repossess their closeness, but she forces herself to keep her distance.) “What’s wrong?” he asks, worried. “Did you not...should I have asked? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought maybe you wanted...I’ll go now.”

“No, no,” she says quickly. “No, I, uh, I wanted that. I just remembered...Jake, you have a girlfriend. What are you doing cheating on Bernice?”

Jake’s worried grimace becomes a grin. “Heh. Uh. Well, I wouldn’t tell you this if Bernice didn’t want me to, but as of today, actually, she said she’s okay with it, with people knowing, I mean, she was always okay with the thing itself...the thing being that she’s a lesbian. Bernice, I mean. She likes girls.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I was her beard. I Easy-A’d her. You know, like when Emma Stone pretended to sleep with her gay friend? Same thing. She came out to me, like, the first day she started here. She said that was why she transferred away from her other school--she was getting bullied so bad she couldn’t deal with it, so when she came here, she was gonna be closeted for a while, suss out the situation. So she asked me to pretend to be her boyfriend, and, well, you’d made it clear you weren’t interested, so I figured, it’s not like I was going to get a real girlfriend, I might as well have a fake one. It making you jealous was just an added bonus.” He pauses and looks into her eyes. “It did make you jealous, right?”

“Completely,” Amy admits. “So all the PDA was just smokescreen?”

“Exactly. But, now that Bernice has been here a few months, now that she’s seen that we’re all totally cool with Holt and that Schur High doesn’t really do the whole bullying thing...she told me that she wants to come out, which means breaking up with me. Actually, don’t tell anyone, but I think she might like Rosa.”

“Hmm. I wouldn’t be surprised if that could actually work out.”

“Anyway,” says Jake, “if you’re satisfied Bernice-wise...would it possibly be okay if I kissed you again? Like, indefinitely?”

“Nope,” says Amy, “you can’t kiss me again.”

“Oh.” All the joy disappears from his face in what is, to Amy, an extremely flattering change of mood. “Can I ask why?”

“You can ask why.” Pedantic of her, perhaps, but he knew what he was getting himself into.

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to kiss you instead.” Which she does, and this kiss is even better than the last--freed of all worries that she’s the Other Woman, knowing that Jake never stopped liking--no, loving, he’d said loving--her, she can give into it entirely, allow herself to feel only the joy of requited emotion and passion.

It feels pretty damn great.

So they keep kissing, out there in the forest, for God knows how long, until a shiver running through Amy’s body reminds her that it’s early April after sundown in the northeastern United States, which is to say, it’s cold.

“It’s getting late,” she says reluctantly, and Jake nods with equal reluctance.

“There’s going to be a campfire at nine,” he offers. “You want to grab a couple coats and head over?”

“Absolutely.”

*

The campfire has only a few people huddled around, maybe nine or ten, by the time they get there. To Amy’s surprise, two of those people are Holt and his husband, who are discreetly holding hands while sitting a PG-appropriate distance apart from each other on a log.

Some kid Amy doesn’t recognize has an acoustic guitar, and is stumbling his way through Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” while Gina, who’s sitting next to him, chimes in on the “ly-lah-ly” parts of the chorus.

Jake and Amy, now appropriately bundled up, sit next to each other, a bit closer than the Holts (because it’s cold, Amy rationalizes to herself, then remembers that she doesn’t have to rationalize wanting to be close to Jake anymore).

Gina finishes singing and comes over to join them. “Hey, Uptight One, what was with running out on us during dinner? You totally left me and Rosa to clean up after you. Not good form.”

“I’m sorry,” says Amy. “I wasn’t feeling well.”

“She totally puked all over the place,” Jake said. “I saw it.”

Amy shoots him the dirtiest of dirty looks, hoping he can see it even in the dark. And she realizes that it’s been a long time since she shot Jake a dirty look with no other motivation than to punish him for teasing her. It feels normal and right, and it’s astounding to her that this rhythm is so comfortable, even after everything that’s happened, after stood-up formal dates and miscommunications and dating other people and kissing in the woods (the last of which was less than an hour ago, which she can hardly believe, and she feels it’s impossible for anyone looking at her not to know how incandescently happy she’s been for the last forty-five minutes, though Gina still seems not yet clued in): after all of that, they’re still talking the same way they did back in September when Jake made fun of her for bringing Holt an apple-shaped pencil sharpener.

“Really? Gross,” says Gina, about the fictional puking, and shuffles a little bit away from them. Which is fine by Amy, actually, because it makes her feel more like she’s alone with Jake, which, how far gone is she that she’s thinking things so ridiculously sentimental as that?

“Whatcha thinkin’ about?” Jake asks, poking her in the shoulder.

“Nothing,” says Amy, because, as she realizes at that moment, Jake’s told her he loves her but she’s said nothing of the sort in return (although she’s thought it, definitely, she’s been thinking it for months), and as nice and cozy as this campfire is, she kind of wants to be alone with him for real when she tells him, not in front of Gina and their English teacher and Acoustic Guitar Guy.

“All right,” says Jake, and tentatively reaches out to put his arm around her. She nods enthusiastically in response, and he hugs her closer to him, her head resting on his shoulder, and she grabs hold of his hand and closes her eyes and lets the music fade into her.

*

The next morning, at breakfast, Jake passes her a note. She gives him a weird look in response, because it’s not like they’re in class. It’s mealtime. On the weekend. They’re allowed to talk.

She opens it anyway, though, and immediately sees why he didn’t want to say its contents out loud; it’s the most juvenile and ridiculous note she’s ever received.

In careful block capitals, the note reads: “SKIP MORNING ACTIVITY AND COME MAKE OUT WITH ME IN MY CABIN. SINCERELY YOURS, JAKE.”

Amy kinda loves it.

Jake’s looking across the table at her, waiting for a response, and she nods, because what the heck, morning activity (birdwatching with Holt) can go on without her.

When Amy gets to Jake’s cabin (he’s sharing with Charles and Terry), she’s surprised to find that it’s somehow already a disaster zone of messiness, despite the fact that they’ve only been there one night.

“Ew,” she says, stepping gingerly over the dirty sock which adorns the threshold. “How can you live like this?”

Jake shrugs. “Easily?”

“Well, I am absolutely not kissing you on that bed. It’s disgusting.”

Jake looks over at his bed, which is covered in clothing and crumbs (and is just a sleeping bag on top of a mattress, because it’s not like the camp provides bedding for them), and nods in agreement. “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from on that one. Your place?”

“No!” says Amy quickly, and, to quell Jake’s hurt expression, adds, “It’s just that Gina’s morning activity is charades, and you just know she’s going to insist on using props, and all of her stuff is in our cabin, so she might be running in and out of the room, and she might see us…”

“She saw us at the campfire last night, and you didn’t seem to mind that.”

“We weren’t making out at the campfire last night,” Amy explains. “I...it’s not that I’m ashamed of liking you, or whatever. I’m not! At all! But as of two days ago everyone thought that you were with Bernice and I was with Teddy, and I don’t want to be judged for jumping from guy to guy so soon. And I don’t want everyone knowing about us. Not yet. This feels different, you know? Like it’s a bigger deal than any other relationship either of us has ever had. I kind of like the idea of it just being between us for a little while.”

Jake frowns for a moment. “Why do you care if people judge you? Your actual friends won’t.”

“I don’t know,” says Amy. “Maybe it’s different because I’m a girl. People are harsher.”

“Well, if it matters to you, I’m fine with keeping it a secret,” he tells her, and her heart melts. “Plus, secret relationship? Way sexy. I am on board.”

“You’re impossible,” she tells him, shaking her head.

“And you love it,” he retorts.

Yeah, she definitely does.

*

They end up deciding to go back to Amy’s cabin, but to stay in the (empty) closet, to prevent anyone coming in and catching them _in flagrante_.

The closet’s cramped and dark and has a weird smell, but after about two seconds of Jake’s mouth on hers, Amy stops caring. Because his hands on her hips are warm, and she can feel them even through her jeans, the heat of them, and she’s sandwiched between his body and the wall, so that his touch and smell and taste are the only things she can feel, and as far as she can see anything his body is all she can see, and all she wants to hear are the soft sounds of their bodies readjusting as they move together, kissing each other like they were born to it.

Unfortunately, that’s not all she hears. She also hears the unmistakable sound of Gina’s voice floating into the room, complaining about the insufficiently objective set of standards for charades.

“Shh,” she whispers to Jake, who reluctantly backs away from her (and she immediately mourns the loss of his warmth) and listens to Gina’s rambling.

“It’ll be okay,” he reassures her quietly, putting a comforting hand on her tense shoulder. “She’ll be in and out in no time. We’re not going to get caught.”

Amy nods, glad he knows what to say to calm her down.

But then another voice joins Gina’s, raised not in complaint but in thought. “Do you think it’ll be all right if we use onion powder instead of fresh onions in the chicken tonight? I told Terry that it’s not even close to the same thing, but apparently fifty fresh Vidalia onions weren’t in the school’s budget, so we’re stuck with powder. I’m really very worried about how this will impact the overall texture of the dish…”

“What is _Charles_ doing in your cabin?” Jake hisses.

“Maybe he came to help Gina carry something?” Amy whispers back.

“Oh my god, shut up and mack on me already!” says Gina, and the full horror of the situation dawns upon Amy in a moment of terrible clarity.

“They’re hooking up!” she whispers to Jake frantically. “They’re hooking up!"

“Shit,” says Jake, so loudly that Amy slaps a hand over his mouth in fright, then mentally scolds herself for the fact that the slap was just as loud as his exclamation.

Fortunately, Charles and Gina don’t seem to hear anything. Unfortunately, this seems to be because they’re so busy making out they don’t have any attention to spare for anything else.

“What do we do?”

“Wait it out until they leave?” Jake suggests.

Amy waits for a moment, until the smacking and soft sighing from outside the closet become too much. “Ugh. Nope. Can’t. Need a distraction.”

“Oh, really?” says Jake, and even though it’s dark in the closet she can still see the spark in his eye. “I have an idea.”

He moves in towards her and she jerks away. “What are you doing?”

“Distracting you,” he says, and his whisper is sexy-raspy enough that she almost goes with it, until a particularly wet-sounding noise from outside reminds her what’s going on.

“I am not making out with you in the same room as Gina and Charles. Nope. Nope nope nope.”

“Fine,” says Jake, and slides his body down the closet wall until he’s sitting on the floor. Amy slides down to join him, and he covers her ears with his hands in an act of what she can only assume is charity. In thanks, she lightly strokes his cheek with her thumb, and he smiles.

They stay like that, hunched against the wall, completely silent, until Gina and Charles realize it’s almost lunchtime and leave.

Jake thrusts open the closet door and stumbles out. “I wonder if this is what inmates feel like when they get out of prison,” he says, and Amy rolls her eyes.

But all she says is, “Come on. We’re going to be late for lunch.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the penultimate chapter!  
> See you at the end, everyone.


	12. May

Exactly two weeks after kissing Jake in the woods, Amy’s sitting down at her desk at home, a new college-ruled notebook in front of her, flipped open to the first page and with only a heading written on it: “Ways To Announce to the World That Amy and Jake Are Dating.” Six sharpened pencils are lined up on the desktop, and Amy’s holding a seventh, the point slightly dulled from writing the page’s title, poised above the notebook, and she waits for inspiration. Or a comment from Jake, who’s slouched behind her on her bed, examining her bookshelf and paying absolutely no attention to Project Come Clean.

Project Come Clean--otherwise known as Project We Have To Admit That We’re Dating Eventually, Amy, I Mean, You Want to Go to Prom Together, Don’t You, Well, How Can We Do That If We’re Not Officially a Couple--was Jake’s idea in the first place, so Amy’s more than a little ticked off that he seems to have no contributions to make to it, being instead more than a little engrossed in her complete set of the Chronicles of Narnia.

“Dude, I love these books,” he tells her, cracking open _The Horse and His Boy_ and resting his head on her pillow. He looks at home there, Amy realizes--possibly because he is, because ever since they got back from camping they’ve been spending most of their free time in each other’s bedrooms, talking and making out. Even though Amy’s parents are stricter than Jake’s mom, they’ve decided that her house is still better because it’s also filled with her seven brothers, all of whom take up enough attention that Amy can basically get away with sneaking a boy into her room unnoticed. (And ever since the Tampon Fiasco of seventh grade, no one ever enters Amy’s room without knocking. They’re too afraid of what they might see.)

So the sight of Jake dipping into C. S. Lewis and mussing her floral duvet with his dirty Converse is no longer a discordant one for Amy, but seems part of her life now--she’s just a girl hanging out with her boyfriend.

Thinking of Jake as her boyfriend, though, brings her back to what they’re supposed to be doing--figuring out how to make their relationship public.

“Come on, Jake, you can read later. I want thoughts on reveal strategies.”

“We live in the internet age,” Jake reminds her. “Let’s just make it Facebook-offisch. Easy-peasy.”

“I think that’s too big of a step,” says Amy, frowning. “It needs to be more casual. Like, holding hands in the hallways in front of Gina, so that she notices and tells everyone.”

“All right, write that down,” agrees Jake. “But this is going to be a big deal, no matter how we go about it. I mean, not only is the hottest commodity at Schur High announcing he’s taken, we’re also admitting to all our friends that we’ve been lying to them since we got together. I can guarantee that Charles is going to be pretty disappointed in me, at least. So, even though I know you want to try to ease people into this gently, I think doing something big and shiny might distract people enough that they don’t get so mad at us.”

Amy starts to nod, then pauses. “Wait. _Have_ we been lying to all our friends?”

“I mean, I sure haven’t told them.”

“Yeah, I know, but...they never asked. We’ve lied by omission, okay. But no one has ever straight-up directly asked us if we’re dating.”

“So?”

“So what if we got them to?”

*

The next day, at school, Jake doesn’t leave Amy’s side. He’s there, waiting, when she walks in the door, and the way his face breaks into a grin as he sees her makes her heart basically leap out of her chest, even though she knows very well that’s anatomically impossible. And even though she knows equally well that he’s only being so clingy because it’s part of the plan, she also knows that there’s sincere emotion behind that grin, and after weeks of avoiding each other, of sneaking around, it feels pretty damn great to see all that emotion out in the open.

Gina is the first one to notice, of course, her eyes going bug-wide when she sees how Jake’s acting (and how Amy’s welcoming it), and sure enough, before Amy gets a text after second period.

 

GINA: hey girl come to the third floor ladies room asap we need to talk

AMY: Okay, I’ll be right there. But I think it’s gross that you’re texting in the bathroom.

GINA: i’m not on the toilet so not even gross, plus everyone does it, grow up

 

“Well?” Amy asks, strolling into the bathroom, completely confident for once, so sure of how this is going to play out that she’s not even reviewing possible responses in her head, comebacks to each and every thing Gina could say.

“You and Jake totally hooked up, didn’t you?”

This is not the phrasing Amy was expecting.

“I, uh, I don’t know if I’d call it…”

“I knew it! All right. I can’t say I didn’t see this coming. Time for negotiations to begin.”

“Negotiations?”

“You guys got together while we were camping, didn’t you?”

“Yeah--uh--wait, how did you know that?”

“Because,” says Gina, widening her eyes dramatically, “I saw you. It’s only too clear to me what happened, little Amy. Devastated at the end of what seemed to you like the only relationship you would ever have, you turned to the arms of one Jake Peralta for consolation. You saw it as a passing fling. Terrified lest anyone should discover your indiscretion, you insisted that the dirty deed be done in the darkness of a closet. What you didn’t know was that Jake Peralta has an extremely distinctive breathing pattern when he is nervous or aroused. But I, having known him since basically the womb, noticed this breathing pattern at once when I entered that same cabin. I knew Jake was in that closet with someone, but until today, I didn’t know who. But now it appears that Jake wants more from your assignation than that one moment of bliss you gave him. And his lovesick attitude is threatening to reveal your tryst to the school. Well, Amy Santiago, I can be generous. I will keep my knowledge from the rest of Schur High’s student body. But at a price.”

Amy takes a step back, bewildered. “You knew we were in the closet? But then you know that we know that you were with Charles?”

“And that,” Gina admits, “is the price. We both made terrible sexual mistakes, Amy. Me in hooking up with a loser, and you in hooking up at all, what with that whole prudish shame complex you’ve got going on. But I will keep your secret if you are willing to keep mine. You can’t reveal you’ve seen me and Charles without revealing that you were with Jake. And I am in the same trap. But I think we should swear each other to secrecy, just in case.” Gina spits on her hand and holds it out.

“But…” Amy falters. “But I’m not ashamed!”

“Nice bluff.”

“I’m not! I _like_ Jake. I don’t care if people know we’re together! And it wasn’t just a ‘tryst,’ we didn’t just ‘hook up,’ we’re dating, Gina, for real, and everyone’s going to know soon anyway! I’ll keep your secret about Charles, okay, whatever. But I’m not going to swear to anything, because I don’t want your promise of secrecy!”

Gina frowns. “I still think you’re bluffing. If you’re really dating Jake, why haven’t you seemed into him at all?”

Amy shakes her head in desperation. “I just don’t like public displays of emotion, okay?”

Gina sighs. “It appears you’re not yet ready to negotiate. Let me know when you get out of denial and change your mind.”

*

In the end, it’s not Gina who ends up discovering the truth.

“Santiago!”

It’s Rosa.

“Santiago, I need to talk to you.” Her face is emotionless, as usual, but there’s urgency in her voice, and Rosa doesn’t speak urgently without good reason, so Amy follows her outside.

“What is it?"

“Peralta really likes you.”

“What?”

“Peralta really likes you, okay? Like, in a mushy, romantic way. Don’t ask me why I’m doing this. It’s because you’re my stupid friends and I don’t want either of you to get hurt, okay? You need to know how he feels before one of you does something stupid. Peralta really likes you, and you should decide whether you like him back.”

“I do,” Amy says, without thinking about the Plan, just telling the truth. “Rosa, Jake and I are dating.”

Rosa cocks her head. “Do you mean,” she says evenly, “that the two of you are already falling all over each other, and there was no reason for me to get involved at all?”

“Basically,” says Amy, stifling a laugh. “But, hey, while you’re feeling altruistic, mind telling everyone? You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get a rumor started around here.”

*

Either Rosa somehow manages to gossip for the first time in her life, or Gina decides to take Amy at her word, because by the end of the day, everyone knows that Jake and Amy are dating.

After school, they sit on a bench outside, and Jake places his arm around her, like at the campfire, but out in the open this time, broad daylight, where anyone could see.

Terry and his girlfriend walk by, holding frozen yogurt cups, and they wave to Jake and Amy as they pass, and Jake waves back and Amy just smiles. Bernice passes by a little while later, stops and talks to them for a few minutes, and without the pang of jealousy Amy used to feel every time she saw her, she actually enjoys the conversation. Charles comes and sits directly between them for a time, seemingly oblivious, but dashes off once he sees Gina walk by.

“Do you think they’re still…” Amy asks Jake.

He shrugs. “Who knows? Who cares?”

The last person they see before Amy has to leave to catch her train, the last member of the Schur High family to casually walk by, is Holt. He doesn’t quite stop in his tracks when he sees them together, but his gait is very definitely thrown off, and Amy thinks she sees a twinkle of approval in his eyes when he nods at them formally.

When she tells Jake about the twinkle, however, he throws his head back and laughs for a full minute at the idea that Holt could possibly have an opinion on their relationship.

“I saw what I saw,” Amy insists, and Jake humors her by shutting up.

*

Jake and Amy go to prom together, not in a limo, and Jake shows up an hour early, “because I know you start panicking an hour before it’s officially time to panic and I didn’t want you to panic that I was going to stand you up again.”

They take the subway over (Amy has a towel in her bag so that they can sit down without worrying about getting the dirt from the seats all over their fancy clothes) to the same hotel that winter formal was at, and Jake sucks in his breath when he sees how fancy the ballroom is, and Amy laughs at him, and he rolls his eyes at her.

They don’t actually end up dancing all that much, just in a big group with everyone else for the fun songs. Jake suggests they try one slow dance, and Amy says yes, but reluctantly, and they have to stop after thirty seconds because she’s already stepped on his feet to the point of bruising them. Instead of dancing, they sit at a table with a bunch of their friends and Jake tells terrible jokes and Amy can’t stop laughing, she’s so happy.

Terry and the other seniors kick all of the juniors off of the dance floor at the end of the night, and Amy watches as the football team releases a bunch of balloons they were hiding in one of the smaller connected rooms, and as all the seniors jump around and try to pop them. She feels sad, for a moment, thinking of how this will be them, next year, of how high school is three-quarters done.

Then Jake squeezes her hand, and she remembers that they have another full year left, another chance to do all the things they haven’t done, and she smiles and shakes off the sadness.

Afterwards, when they’re walking back to the subway, just the two of them, Amy stops in her tracks and takes Jake’s hands in hers and looks up at him and says, for the first time, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he says, with that big dumb beautiful puppy grin on his face, “but you already knew that.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she says, grinning right back at him, and he leans down to kiss her.

All in all, Amy thinks to herself, after she gets home that night, junior year wasn’t half bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's all, folks! Thank you all so much for reading and commenting and kudos-ing; it's been an awesome ride. I've already started on my next Jake/Amy fic, so keep an eye out for that sometime, oh, let's say, in January?  
> See you around!


End file.
